This past Thursday I did a photo shoot in Benson with several photographer friends. We met at Chris Tierney’s place earlier that evening and waited for our models to arrive. Around 7pm we headed into downtown Benson to shoot at an automotive shop whose owner Chris had talked to earlier that week. He had gotten us permission to shoot our models on their various vehicles and in their shop. Here are my final photos from the evening. Unfortunately we were only able to shoot for 1 and a half hours that night and I didn’t get a chance to shoot in the garage! As of this writing, two of the four have made to to Flickr’s Top 500 images for the day they were posted online!
The shop owner drove his old caddy into a small lot between his building and Triangle Body Shop. The car was a bit dusty so I asked Chris to see if they had a california duster or anything. He went into the shop and never came back, I think he got involved shooting Anna and forgot! So, I shot Deanna and the caddy and later removed the car dust with Photoshop. I started with a single speedlight in a Speedlight Pro Kit held by Zach Hollowell. It was positioned above Deanna’s face and I asked Zach to keep it inline with where her nose would be after the hair flip. After a few test shots I added a bare strobe to subject left for rim and added a second bare strobe to camera right to add a little bit extra across the front of the car. Finally, I placed a 4th bare flash behind the car to illuminate the side of the building and provide a little more visual interest. Behind Deanna there is a large, and ugly, smoke stack coming off the corner of the building. I positioned myself with my 17-55mm lens so that I would have a unique angle on Deanna and the caddy while placing her in front of the stack to hide it in my photo.
After shooting Deanna and the caddy Zach and I took Adia down to an old truck sitting just off the street near a white building. The sun was beating down straight from camera right, almost perpendicular. I pulled out my 5-in-1 reflector and Zach held the diffuser behind the cab just out of frame right with a zebra tr-grip reflector held just out of bottom frame. Shooting this shot without flash was obvious since we had the sun as our lighting and this also allowed me to shoot at F2.8 for limited depth of field since I didn’t have to worry about sync speed. The diffuser held so close allows it to do it’s job and the zebra reflector adds a little bit of gold light.
Once Chris and Jeremy were done shooting Anna inside the garage they brought her up to the caddy. Then, Deanna and Adia’s sister brought her large snake to get its picture taken! Anna did a great job of letting the snake crawl all over her! We had a similar flash setup here to the first shot, except the two front strobes are now on either side of the car and the rear building light was pulled back further to illuminate more of the building side. This position also made it possible to get either flare or rim light around Anna’s head depending on your position. Chris was shooting with Jeremy’s CyberSync trigger so I stuck mine back on my camera and pulled off a few shots as well.
After getting Anna’s shot finished we shot Adia on the caddy with the snake. I had on my 70-200mm lens but wasn’t liking what I was getting. I went to change back to my 17-55mm to get a different angle and by the time I did Adia was off the car! We all decided we’d move on a few blocks away to an alley to finish off the day.
As we started getting things together I noticed how the sun was coming in through one of the store windows just up the street. I grabbed Deanna because I thought her dress would offer nice contrast with the building and I posed her next to it so the sun would be directly behind her. I asked Chris to hold an umbrella up on my right pointed right at Deanna’s face and I placed a strobe to the left for rim light while being sure to have it back far enough to not blow out any portion of Deanna’s face. After this shot was taken I moved Diana over to the building to lean against it for another pose but at that time her sister came running back down saying that her car was towed! She had parked in a bar’s parking lot with towing signs but figured it wasn’t busy so there was no reason to tow. I’m sure that bar owner gets a kick back and I’ll make sure to never go there…. not that I’ve ever been there before… but still. Deanna had driven all of the girls to the location so they all piled back in to go back to Chris’s house to get their cars and all of us photographers wrapped up, loaded up my truck and headed back as well. The shoot only lasted 1.5 hours but we came home with a lot of great images!