I hope to be working with the company some more in the near future, but for now here’s a few of the shots from the shoot . . .

For the strobists amongst you: I was working with one Canon Speedlight 580 EXII, using a lastolite 80cm umbrella-box on a light stand, triggered using an Elinchrom Skyport, and both camera and flashgun were on manual.  f-stops were around 5.6, shutter speeds anything between 1/30th and 1/160th, with ISO again starting at 200 increasing to 800 as the daylight vanished!

This was one of those shots that took a little bit of patience to light correctly, to get the left hand side of his face to just creep out of the shadow,and to get a decent amount of fall-off onto the background.  I love the way all the colours subtly blend into each other.

This is just naturally window lit.

I seem to have a strange fascination with roller-shutters at the moment, I think it’s just a phase.

A winning combo guaranteed: Brick walls, shallow depth-of-field, moody stare.

We attempted to get some shots that look like they’d been pulled from a movie, even down to the widescreen ratio.

All in all a hard, but fun 2 hour shoot which bagged Liam about 80 shots.  Its kinda nice when you’ve photographed someone before, because you know how far you can push them and where they’re coming from.

The first batch were all shot using just natural light, until it started to get pretty thin and we had to whip out our flashguns.

These are some crazy strip lights that are fixed in the pavement

A quick grab shot with a flashgun zoomed in to pick out Alex from the street.

I didn’t have much time with Stef, as the all other photographers seemed to be hogging her, but of the few I managed to get, this was my favourite.

Check out Rachel’s beautiful sounds here

This was one of the last pictures from the shoot, but my favourite.  We were planning to wrap the shoot up with a few portraits like this in a huge room that we found in the gym, however by the time we got round to it, the room was being used for an aerobics class, so we decided to hunt around and ending up in the changing room.  I’m glad we did it here instead though.

These were a couple of high-key portraits we captured at the front-end of the shoot; 2 lights and a white wall, Bailey style.

Lastly we had a coffee and a chat after the shoot then I had the stupid idea of comparing gunshows, this pic was snapped on my iPhone by Tony’s son.

I somehow think I’d lose an arm wrestle very quickly.

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

The plan was basically to get a few models, make-up artists, a location, and a boot full of lighting gear and give ourselves a day of shooting fashion photography.  After finding our models Viv, Steph, Clare and Mat and our make-up artist Katy, the location we found to shoot at was a rough and ready garage in Leeds; rusty cars, oily rags, muddy puddles and old tires pretty much sets the scene.

After setting up base and finding a place for the cooler full of lunch, Katy and her assistant Pooja got to work on giving the models some incredible make-up and hair styles.  It was great fun and a pretty creative and collaborative process between all of us in terms of the finished photos, with everyone giving their input and ideas.  Rain stopped play for a lot of the exterior shots but with so much scope for shooting inside, neither of us ran out of inspiration.  The garage is also home to an electro producer and DJ who had the speakers turned to 11 for the second half of the day helping set the mood for the images.

Along also for the day was the awesome Cris Matthews, who was there to document the day video style, and we hope to have this edited and online by the end of next week, so I’ll put another post up with a few more images.

A pretty cool day all round, and we can’t wait to set the next one up.  Let me know what you think of the results below.

Check out this “Rob in Action” shot canned by Adam who was assisting on the shoot.