This week we had Wooden Dog, the band, in from BIMM Birmingham and we welcomed them to the studio for their shoot. After a false start and a cancellation due to sickness last week Brian and I were primed for the arrival at 10am.
Set Up
I’d got in super early and prepped the area with some boards and fixed the clock and pictures to the walls as a way of giving off a vibe of a front room, or a working man’s club. We set up a low level sofa for the band to lean back in, a chair to one side to break up the line, and a small table in front of the scene with a retro styled telephone and a box of dominoes. In the corner of the area stood a standard lamp, purchased last week from Air Ambulance Charity Shop.
I also set up my GoPro Timelapse camera on top of the changing room so I could capture the changes to the scene and set up, as well as the people moving around. I’d pick this from the wall once the shoot had finished and then check it out at home.
Once the set was prepared I moved onto setting up the camera gear. I picked up the tripod and universal Broncolor trigger from Dan in the Stores and then went to try and tether my Canon 5D to the Mac in the white scoop area. As I tried to log in, it refused me as it needed a local account to allow it to connect to the WiFi before then allowing local logons. Dan logged into the Mac for me and then I started Lightroom, plugged in my 5D with the weird USB3 connector that exists in the port slots.
It didn’t work and the USB cable I had was not long enough anyway so I elected to forget about the tethering and just shoot directly with the camera. This is a reason why a few of my shots were goosed but we’ll cross that when we get there. Dan suggested that I book out the Sony camera as that would tether with no issues and I could then use that camera, so I tried booking one out of the stores but inadvertently booked it out for a week later than needed. Doh.
Crack On
I therefore decided that it was time to crack on with the shoot and forget about trying to learn a new camera from scratch in the middle of a shoot where I was already nervous about shooting in the studio and having to pose people. I went back to the Canon 5D without the tethering and set about putting the flashes into the right place.
I chose the large octobox above the set and then a smaller octobox to fill in at the front set them both up to give me the lighting at f/8 or f/11 for 1/125sec shutter speed, all at ISO400 on the digital camera. To set this up and check it I used my Sekonic light meter and then altered the light power, or moved them up and down to increase the distance between them and the subject.
Once I was happy with this set up I checked my WhatsApp and found a message from the band to say that they were here in the reception so I walked up, welcomed them to the School Of Art and then headed down to the studio. I find it really important to engage with people and use their names as frequently as possible, without being too weird. I think this helps with connections and possibly that I am interested in them outside of just taking photographs. I had also learned some background about their music, their chosen instruments and even checked out their Spotify playlists, Alfie’s consisted of the scores of many different Star Wars movies.
Arrival
Once in the studio, they were introduced to Brian and also Sam who they’d bet before on shoots and were offered a drink of water. They were shown the changing room in case they needed it, they’d brought with them a few changes of clothes, along with their instruments, well the guitars anyway. I’d had a chat with them on WhatsApp and discussed that perhaps bringing drums or keyboards was probably impractical, which we all agreed on.
Once the group were sat on the set, after complimenting it with phrases like “this is so cool” and “this is great”, we set about calibrating cameras and lighting for both Brian and my own set ups.
Shutter Speed Issues
Brian was having issues with some of his photo being black and the rest exposed acceptably. I pointed out to him that this is because he had his shutter speed set too high, too fast. The shutter was closing before the flash had time to work its magic and bounce back to the sensor. I thought light was pretty fast but obviously the delays and latency of commands between some systems tend to add up and cause issues like this. I hadn’t yet noticed but I was set at 1/200th of a second and all looked ok on the small screen at the rear of the camera. Little did I know that these first few shots were to be tainted by the same issue as Brian’s initial images. A black bar appears at the foot of my images and spoils a few of the early ones but these were not my finest work anyway so I’m not that bothered. The black line was not immediately obvious to me on the screen as the overlay of information such as shutter speed and aperture appears on a dimmed line at the foot of the LCD. On top of this when I was shooting too fast, I was getting the odd dark image, it was because the power of the flash was too Highland needed a little longer to recharge.
In The Beginning
The band sat on the sofas and played with the props that were provided, finding ways to have fun and remain natural and looking relaxed. In some images they had their instruments, in others, they were leaned against the wall behind. The standard lamp wasn’t that important as the light from it was not immediately obvious, with the flashes overpowering it. The vibe of the shots were coming though nicely and the band were beginning to ask if they could have certain shots. Alfie was apologetic in the extreme and was requesting the shots of them from face front and at a low angle. They were all super polite and apologetic and I asked them to stop apologising as this was their shoot more than it was ours.
We worked together to gather a set of photos of them playing around and I thought it needed bit more dynamism so I asked Alfie to pick up his guitar and play through a song. Luca was singing along with the harmonies and Drewe, George and Ben were making other sounds by banging the table or sofa to fill in the blanks. I got a few images of this section and they did look more animated.
We did some work on moving the sofas around, first with the chairs moved 45degrees to each other and then facing together as you might in a social club, we moved the lighting around too to fit better. Alfie said he liked the original image format of the chair off to the one side with an outlier breaking up the image a little.
Colourful Scenes
We then selected to do some work with a colour or two on the back of the set, so I asked Sam for some help with the flash units featuring gels, and looking at the moodboard we selected a vintage yellow orange colour. Then it looked odd that one half of the shot was white and the other yellow. The colours were still better than the clinical white background of the boards. We elected another light and ended up with a purple/mauve type colour that seemed to complement the original yellow/orange.
We shot a few different configurations and for some of them I was almost in the black scoop using my 24-105mm lens to zoom in and close it all down a bit tighter. The band loved this style of shot so I kept repeating the angle with the different set ups we were trying. For a few photos I took down the pictures from the wall, leaving only the clock to provide some reference point.
On The Other Hand
As a point of interest the clock I had set to 13:50 as this is one of the times that clock manufacturers set their devices to when advertising their analog clocks. The hands represent a smile or a happy face and if you look in catalogues or websites selling watches and clocks you’ll often see the same configuration.
Things Are Looking Up
I wanted to try an alternative type of shot too, where I lay on the floor and shot straight upwards at the faces of the band who are leaning over the camera. It wasn’t initially successful as the ceiling of the area was a mix of the white scoop and the upper ceiling with air vents and service ducts etc. It wa a bit messy. I chose to then get the band further into the scoop and shoot from the edge of the scoop towards the top of the scoop, trying to avoid spilling out into the ceiling above. Some of these were quite successful to my eyes and I found that at least two of them would work well as a place to put a block of text above it.
Whilst we had the gels and flashes disconnected I then stood and shot the group agains the wall of the scoop. I did some wide shots before Alfie asked for some from the waist up and then at the end I had them clown around a little to break off a bit of the tension that they may have been feeling. They were messing about and I suggested a piggy back for a couple of people, Ben picked up Luca at this point and then they were all remonstrating that we were trying to change their image into that of One Direction. Ha ha.
Breaking Down
The shoot came to a halt pretty swiftly as Luca was supposed to be in the private studio with Clare and Louise doing a shoot for his act which is him solo. Luca Simian. He is supported by a band that also includes most of the members of the Wooden Dog band and they all work together in their own individual projects. Some of the other solo artists from BIMM also rely on the other instrumentalists so when they are on stage with their contemporaries they might spend all night playing drums or bass. Drewe appears to be a bassist for most of the bands.
We broke down the set swiftly and tidied up all of the lights, cables, boards and props, whilst saying a goodbye to the band. I put away all of my camera gear, waited for Dan to open the stores before depositing the tripod and triggers and then sat at a Mac to download the photos from my SD Card for an initial look through.
Once home, I downloaded all of the photos from the Q3, 5D and the GoPro onto Lightroom before going through them all marking them as star ratings. 1 stars were to be disposed of, 5 stars would be selected for editing and 4 star photos would be backups of these in case there were other images that the band wanted.
Some of them would need editing to remove the dirt off the floor, the odd mark on the walls, or a screw hole etc. I would do this in Lightroom for the main part and use the healing Remove tool to get rid of the parts of the image I no longer needed. Other alterations I’d do would be to change the exposure slightly if the shots were a bit overexposed or the highlights might have been blown out.
Other edits I used were straightening and cropping to remove the edges of the images and walls or cables etc.
Reflection
I was super nervous and cacking my pants about the band coming in for a shoot as I’m not normally in a studio or working with people like this. I take photographs of buildings and people on the street in a candid manner so this isn’t really one of my comfort zones.
I spent the time building up a rapport with the band on WhatsApp and designing the set for the props and ideas about how they can be posed in front of the lens. In the words of a few engineers I work with regularly “Prior Planning And Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance”, the 7Ps. Time spent up front prepping often makes it easier to get it all together once in the studio or on location. I had brought picture hooks, hammers and other tools with me to enable a quick set up and not scripting around looking for items.
The shoot went well with good levels of collaboration and the band were grateful for what Brian and I were doing. They especially liked the photos once I had edited the 5 star image, tidied them up and cleaned them up a bit. I shared a few on the WeTransfer site with the band via WhatsApp and they were really pleased with the results.
It was nice to see the different colours on the set and I wish we had spent more time developing a plan of colour schemes. I think that some of the band were not that happy with the colour backgrounds but I can use photoshop to alter the colours to something more akin to their preferences.
It’s been a struggle, to get the studio shoot completed, through a small amount of nervousness/anxiety and a wish to not annoy people or act in an unprofessional way. I was sweating like a good ‘un throughout the shoot and only cooled down once the shoot was completed.
I should do more of these types of shoots and increase my confidence but I see so many other people’s works being top notch, and I don’t feel that my practice really focusses on these types of shoots. Who knows, maybe I’ll start doing a few more photos like this.
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