A good, old fashioned, daylong photo shoot. I hired the assistant and the make up artist while the client team worked with several talent agencies to get our models. These ads are three of the dozen that we created on the shoot day. We used a large meeting room (about 5,000 square feet) as our temporary studio and set up a light gray seamless background to shoot against. Since we were looking for movement and action my assistant and I lit the set with six electronic flashes; some in umbrellas, some through grids and a main light in a big soft box.
The in-house design team put together a bunch of examples of the energy they were trying to convey and we tried to maintain some high energy throughout the day.
I used a Panasonic S1R along with the 24-105mm f4.0 S zoom lens for all of the shots. Some people like to shoot tethered to laptops but I think that's too slow so I tether my camera to Ninja V monitors and set several up around the shooting area on lightstands so the crew and the marketing team can watch the progress and make sure we're shooting with enough space to crop in, etc.
When we finished with the shoot I made a web gallery with about 1200 images in it and the client narrowed down their take to about 50 images. I color corrected and retouched each of them and then made selections with masks on new layers for final delivery. We worked with big files because it's easier to do the post accurately; especially when your intention is to drop out the backgrounds and put the people on a constructed graphic background. The images were used on the web but also in very large prints as trade show graphics.
It was a fun and successful campaign for everyone but as is typical these days nearly all of the original creative team on the client side has either been promoted or moved on to "new opportunities."
Just thought I'd share one of the fun projects I put together recently. Yay! Commercial photography still exists!!!
An excellent advertising campaign. Very few people have your level of expertise or experience to pull it off successfully.
ReplyDeleteThe camera and lens is almost an irrelevance: substitute a modern high pixel count Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc., and it would have been as good.
So you are indeed still working. And doing a great job at it. Bravo!
ReplyDeleteThanks guys. I haven't lost my taste for it yet. More fun stuff coming up all next week. Renewed interest in new portraits.
ReplyDeleteDid you do the product shots as well?
ReplyDelete"Did you do the product shots as well?"
ReplyDeleteYes, but on a different day.
I assume that was a video feed to the Ninja V, or is there some way for them to display stills?
ReplyDeleteHi Chuck. You get a video feed until you hit playback and then you get a still image of the selected frame you are playing back. Works well. You can also use bigger monitors as long as they are HDMI capable.
ReplyDelete