I don’t have terribly much to say about this shoot. What can you say about five guys in a bathtub?

Well, I’ll break it down to give you the basics but there is no way I’m going to be able to write creatively on this one.

Who; For the Weekend (Pop-Punk Band, from Calgary, Click for their Myspace)
What; Well, dudes in a bathtub, promo photoshoot
When; Less than 24 hours before i went in for knee surgery
Where; Band Member’s house
Why; I’ve been wondering for a long time, if anyone finds out let me know.

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Behind the scenes of a beer photograph;

Inspiration
- I wanted to make some photographs where gravity is acting strangely; photographs where the viewer’s perception would throw them in loops, questioning what they see, if its real, and how it was done. My first little attempt at this technique was this self portrait.
- The second major piece of inspiration was this Stella Artois Legere ad;

From those two pieces of inspiration I had the idea of beer pouring up against gravity -lighter than air beer- into a glass. Next I had to figure out the best way to do it.
Wanting to most of the shot done in camera I needed to get all the ‘live action’ in one frame, then I could use photoshop to finish and clean up the rest of the shot. I setup a bottle of beer in the studio suspended from the bottom of a large board.
I opened the beer upside down and using a glass in hand catch the beer pouring out. Over several takes with beer pouring into a bucket on the floor (i’m sorry beer lovers I did lose a beer or two to the battle) I got a great action frame.

The shot below shows the studio setup for the live action (Only half the lighting is firing in this frame)

The raw ‘live action’ frame is above to the left, and one of the final bottle’s live frames above right. I photographed the bottle separately, using a lot of transmitted light from behind to complement the very beautifully designed bottles. In photoshop the live action and bottle shots were put together making the final image.

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Migrate over the the portfolio page and you’ll see a whole bunch of new shots, I’ve updated them with more recent pictures of everything. (Unfortunately the Winter gallery didn’t see too much fresh content, my bum knee kept me away from the mountains this winter *tear*)

Theres a whole new gallery of my architecture photography, here are two of my most recent shoot of some calgary architecture photography

The Advertising Gallery is also shiny and new with work you have and haven’t seen.

My mountain bike photography got quite a few new frames;
Evan

A self portrait diptych of fall Mountain Biking in Calgary

Some new faces in my Band and Music photography

Ski got two new frames, you’ve seen them before if you’ve been reading the blog.

At any rate the shots are bigger and thus better looking over in the portfolio pages. If you know of anyone who may need the types photography I specialize in, please share my work with them.

PS: the home page has a new shot up too

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Lighting vignettes interact with the textures of the object, and cast shadows showing how objects line up. The inverse square law of light can also help photographers show depth. Lighting vignettes are only similar to ‘regular’ vignettes in the way they make the perimeter of a photo darker. However using light goes far beyond the benefits of a post production (PP) vignette.

PP vignettes affect the image based on pixels already captured, not on the space you are photographing. PP vignettes generally bring down the brightness value of all the information around the perimeter of the photo. Depending on your methods you can add contrast and texture to the vignette, but it’s still only applying to the existing pixels.
In the same way that you can’t recreate beautiful/realistic split lighting in PP from a sunny day portrait taken at noon, you can’t recreate a lighting vignette.

Shooting with the band For the Weekend we crashed the Fall City Fall house, so we could utilize their photogenic wall space. -This was before FCF got evicted for playing loud music and being general dirt bags.

Lighting;
Key Light; shoot through umbrella a bit above the camera, to the right.
Hair Light; bare strobe top left, behind the subject, with a CTO gel. Cramped space made setting it up interesting; the strobe couldn’t drop to a low enough power, and was nuking the side of Colton’s head. Without a different strobe or neutral density in my bag I thought I was SOL. Wait… polarizers cut light, right? Perfect! I cut two stops of light from a strobe using a screw mount lens polarizing filter.
Light for Vignette; the subject is very close to the shoot thru umbrella, so before adding the 3rd light the background was quite dark –Think inverse square law-. I sat a strobe on the exposed furring strips in the ceiling (no drywall here) and zoomed it in. The zoomed in light creates a small pool of light on the wall; a vignette which interacts with, and enhances the texture of the painted brick.

To make a light vignette, use a strobe to illuminate only part of the visible area. The lit area should frame the subject, with light falling off towards edges of the image. Use either light fall off and the inverse square law, or the edge of the area a strobe is illuminating to make the light drop of closer to the edge of the frame.
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Lighting vignettes aren’t limited to portraiture, what about mountain biking with a lighting vignette? Lighting a location with depth, even more texture, and landscape makes light vignettes even more interesting and beautiful.

Key Light; cam left, high off the ground, zoomed in, bare head. The light isn’t hitting the entire frame equally; the bottom corners of the frame are outside of the strobe’s range because it’s so far zoomed in. These darker parts frame the bottom of the image, the black trees in the background make the upper portion of the light vignette.
Fill Light; cam right, bare head. Kept at a low height to avoid conflicting shadows on the ground, and keep out light vignette looking great.

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