A few weeks back me and my two photographer buddies, Phil Barber and Barnaby Aldrick were looking at lots of cool stateside photographers by the likes of David Jay, Jasmin*, Dave Hill and Chase Jarvis who are all creating short promotional videos to show on their websites.
The three of us blog on a regular basis about the work we do, but we knew that with video it would be a lot easier, cooler and better to showcase how we do, what we do. We also were keen to show potential clients that a photo shoot can and should be a fun thing to be involved with. The majority of people we photograph are not professional models and we wanted to give them an idea of what to expect.
So after several half pints of stout we decided to put a shoot together at a mechanics garage in Leeds. We all wanted to experiment with some new lighting techniques and put the bias of the shoot on high-end high street fashion. I contacted a few models to come along for the day, we arranged a make-up artist and got our good friend Cris Matthews along to capture the video footage. There’s another blog entry below to fill you in on the details of the day.
Anyway, I’m writing too much and ignoring the point of this post which is to show the video! After some late nights in front of a MacBook Pro here’s my final edit of the video. To watch in super spangly High Definition click on the HD logo once the video starts playing. You can also see Cris’ edit here: http://www.vimeo.com/6010320
3B MEDIA • Fashion Photography • Lighting On-Location from Rob Booker on Vimeo.
We decided on the 3B Media name as an umbrella brand for anything the 3 of us do together. Booker, Barber and for alliterative purposes Barnaby. We’ll be working on a few more of these fashion and lighting days over the coming months, and as Cris did such a sterling performance of making us HD-Ready, he’ll be along for the ride too.
3B Media are planning to do some training workshops in January 2010, so if you’d like to come along to one then please get in touch. There’ll be in a similar theme to what you see on the video here, giving all you photographers a chance to shoot some new portfolio material, learn and develop your skills behind the camera, meet some like minded people, and bug the 3 of us to death about how we do what we do! As we shoot more videos over the rest of the year we’ll be posting them up on our blogs so you can get a feel for what the training days will be like.
More on 3B Media later, but for now here’s a few more of my pictures from the day. There’s no geeky tech details here, but don’t be shy about posting a comment and I’ll fill you in on the f-stops and focal lengths and flash ratios.
First up we’ve got Matt who is a super cool all round good bloke, coming up with some crazy but awesome ideas. I found this wedge shaped corridor and after clearing it out, Matt experimented with the space throwing out some acrobatics to get into these positions.
This was shot behind a couple of container crates I found in the yard of the garage. It was raining pretty badly by this point, so we had about 2 minutes to get some pictures before my camera started giving me electric shocks. The suit Matt’s wearing is a £3 charity shop special, and the cross of tape was his idea. I think portraits are a lot more interesting, when you can imagine a story behind the details.
Next up we’ve got Clare who is a photographer as well as a model herself, so was keen to see what was going on both sides of the camera. This picture was a pretty quick set-up with 3 flashes and again I let Clare experiment with the space. The processing on the shot I pushed as much as Photoshop would let me, I wanted it to have as much punch as possible, but ultimately it’s the red glasses that make the shot.
Stef was one of the first models who was ready on the day and most of the mechanics stopped work once we started shooting! This set-up was shot with a ring-flash and giant softbox off to one side. Processing again was pushed as far as I can take it.
Viv had Phil’s attention for most of the day, but I saw the potential of this yellow steel door as soon as we rocked up in the morning. Then when Viv came down wearing a black dress and a splash of red lipstick, I was dying to put the 2 together.
Here’s a gallery with some more images on:
[svgallery name="For Blog"]
Check out Phil’s blog and Barnaby’s blog for their side of the day, and if you want to get in contact with any of the other guys involved you can do so here:
Make-Up • Katy Padam • www.ktmakeup.co.uk
Video • Cris Matthews • www.crismatthews.com
Models • Stef Jones via modelmayhem.com, Vivienne Edge via modelmayhem.com and Clareski via modelmayhem.com
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