This week saw Brian and I preparing for a shoot in the white scoop at the Wolverhampton School Of Art. The subject of the shoot was to be the band from BIMM known as Wooden Dog. The band is a five piece folk rock band that ares in various stages of studying for their degrees in music performance.
I had been busy on the Saturday accompanying my son on his first real long drive since passing his driving test a couple of weeks before. A trip to Portsmouth and then back across to Slough where we took a tube into the city for some exhibitions that will come in another post. As a result of getting back after 11pm from the long road trip I went shopping in town for some props for the shoot on the monday.
Prop Prep
I visited a couple of antique shops in the town centre of Shrewsbury and also some charity shops. Primarily I was looking for a standard lamp, some pictures and a clock. I managed to come back with a lamp, a large wall clock, a box of pub dominos and a board game (Operation). This along with the two pictures I had printed and framed at home will go nicely together to create a suggestion of a social club or front room vibe as the band had given us a mood board on pinterest.
I have chosen a couple of “kitsch” style pictures that mean a lot to me, not least because my parents had one and it still hangs on their wall, and the other is in the background of the scenery in Bottom, the BBC comedy show.
These were printed out in Acrobat PDFs to fit across two pages and then mounted in the frames I have freed up from photo in previous exhibitions. I have also created a powerpoint slide deck of images that could be used to project onto the band, consisting of a page of their logo, and then random geometric shapes. I was planning on using a digital projector to do this but I can not find it in the house. I think I may have donated it to a charity shop after I’d finished with it the last time.
My son had also asked me if tomorrow would be a good time to do some Headshots for him in the studio? He is a musical theatre performer and needs to keep his portfolio up to date so he can be represented by his agent with a hope of gaining employment in an entertainment industry that is quite challenging. His last set of headshots were made whilst still at university and he wanted some up to date versions. I emailed my tutor Sam to check that this would be ok to fit in once the band had left the studio.
With all of the gear packed up and my cameras set up by the door of my office/studio for the next morning, I was almost set. Then we had the message into the Whatsapp group chat that some of the group were not feeling well so they would have to call it off. It was a bit gutting but I’d rather take photos of people when they’re feeling well.
With the fact that the band wouldn’t be there it meant that I could attend and take some photos of my son without getting in the way of the band or taking up studio time obstructing one of my colleagues.
No Dogs
Arriving at the uni I started setting up for a quick shoot with my son so I used a big overhead light and a small octabox to fill in from the front. I sat him on a stool and had him change his pose a few times with sideways looks, straight on looks, head leaning forwards/backwards and then with different outfits on.
I used my sekonic light meter and it told me that for iso 400, which my 5D was set to and on a shutter speed of 1/160 that I should be using the aperture f/8. This is just what I wanted, I didn’t want any photos that are blurred after the subjects eyes. the smaller aperture allows me a greater depth of field. There were a couple of shots that were a bit hot and the highlights flashing on the screen showing that it was overexposed. A quick change of the light power and a recheck with the light meter proved that this was bang on.
I was using the Broncolor lighting kit with a universal trigger on my Canon 5D Mk IV and I had struggled at first as when I was setting the lights onto the same channel as the trigger it wasn’t working. The trigger was set as Ch 2 and the small octabox was also on ch 2 so they worked together correctly when I pressed the Test button or depressed my shutter button. The overhead light though was on a different channel and when I changed it to ch 2 also, this failed to work. I spent about twenty minutes trying to figure it out before asking Dan, and he said that once the channel has been changed, it needs to be powered down and restarted so it can pair with the triggers. Doh. Once I’d reset the power, it worked like a dream.
With a few shots in the bag on the white scoop we moved across to the black scoop to make a few more images there. I had tried using the mac minis built into the screen trolleys to tether the camera and thus see what it was I was capturing on a larger screen. Unfortunately, the mac minis were not connected to the network, the cables had nowhere to connect to, and I think that they need to be plugged in , then log in and then they can be used with a local account. I think that the wireless around the uni for staff and computers is still down after the cyber attack they suffered from a while ago.
With the shots in the memory card, I could then plan to take back the tripod and flash trigger to Dan before going over to the library to drop off some books about Berthold Lubetkin.
Limited Editing
Upon getting home later I could start editing the images I got from the days shoot. I spoke with my son first about how much touching up the photos should be subjected to. I didn’t want to overly retouch everything in case it was upsetting for him as it might mean I thought he was as ugly as his dad. We had a chat and worked out that he wanted the worst blemishes, such as spots to be reduced or removed, but nothing like warping to change structure of the facial features.
I used the actions that Sam had given us at the start of the year in the Photoshop Masterclass and worked out how to use it again, whilst editing the photos that we’d selected. I went through each photo with him and used lightroom and the shortcut to add a star rating to each photo. For those that he didn’t want to use, they were given onestar, for those he defineitly wanted a aretouch of, we gave them five starts and the next best would be four stars.Once we trimmed it down using this method, we revisited the shots again until we got it down to his best four or five.
Then I could use the photoshop actions for Split Frequency editing, altering the skin tones to avoid some of the worst parts of the blemishes and then finish it all up with a little bit of heal/clone brush to remove the spots and stray moustache hairs etc.
He was happy with them in the end but we felt that we might have been able to use a bit of colour in the background on the white scoop to give some variation. I had forgotten that we can use gels on the constant lights to provide the background we wanted. I know now and can use this the next time we’re in the studio.
The final shots I forwarded him are shown below. I’m by no means a portrait photographer, or an expert in retouching images. To me, less is more, the more subtle the better. I don’t want anyone thinking that they don’t look nice, everyone looks nice and there shoudl be no need to be upset by a photograph.
Reflection
Overall, it was a good use of the time in the studio, practising with the lights and the triggers, as well as learning a bit more about how to pose someone in the studio and capture som eimages that were requested. The fact that the band were unable to make it, meant that I could spend more time with Ewan, apart from the fact that he got a call from his agent that he needed to record a self tape to send off to a prospective client that was after an actor with a moustache. I helped him in the product studio by setting up the ring lights and then recording him doing his lines in front of an iPhone camera. It was lucky that we were there with all the gear too.
The photos I have of him are the ones he liked most from the bunch of images we made, there were others that I really liked too but he didn’t seem to like these particularly. I guess that his preference and mine are based on different requirements. He needs a photo that might land him a job whilst the photos I liked are the ones that reflect his personality the most, his smile and facial pose. Not saying that the ones he chose are false, far from it, but merely that he wants images that portray a professional appearance and I want a family photo. The changes I made with the retouching are subtle but flicking between the two images does show the parts that have been changed as can be seen below.
Hopefully Wooden Dog will be feeling better on Monday next so that Brian and I can capture som eimages of them in the studio. After that, I’ve got a plan to head down to London on the 22nd March to catch them in concert at The Spice Of Life where they are appearing on the bill.
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