Kempo? Who is he? Thats what I said! Apparently he is an up and coming local Rapper. Not being hip to the Rap scene, the opportunity itself did not stand out more than any other, what was exciting is that I would be working with my good friend and mentor, Luis Ronderos. He had a rare weekend opportunity and knew I would jump at the chance to work on this project. He was right! It was a photo session in a professional studio, with makeup artists, agent, rapper, and sexy model, a pit bull and a trick motorcycle! What more could I ask for?
Saturday morning comes and Luis and I drive over to mid-town Miami, the Art and Design district. Whenever I pass through here, I just have to stop at Enriquetas, a little Cuban cafeteria dive on the corner. We had a great breakfast for about $3 each!
The shoot was to take place at Carousel Studios, and was I impressed! Three large studios, full white seamless infinity walls, each large enough for vehicles. All the camera equipment you could ever dream of, and a helpful staff. We grabbed a Profoto powerpack and 3 heads, a giant octabox, and an an umbrella. We shot with his Rebel XTi and 24-70 L-Series, and my Nikon D-80 with the 70-200VR.
Once the bike was brought in, we mopped the tracks it left on the floor, so learn from this, have the crew clean the bike well before rolling it in on white seamless floors! Then while the model was getting makeup, we decided to test the pit bull….never know how they react to strobes! Turns out he was a just an easygoing pooch, that would work for treats!
The setup, The Main light was the octabox, above and to camera right f8, the umbrella was behind us, maybe a little camera right, and about 12ft from the subjects, providing fill, and then we had a bare head behind the main pointing up and bouncing off the ceiling to light the background and the floor.
We shot for about 2 hours straight with 3 wardrobe changes. The model and subject, Kempo hit it off very well and they made some great images. I spent most of the shoot assisting Luis, learning a lot, and working the equipment, then he gave me the camera and let me shoot off a few while he worked on posing and setting up the shots. This worked great when doing the group shots, as there is a lot to see and be mindful of. Then I popped off a dozen or so with the model and the bike, and then when everyone was wrapping up, I did some nice images of the bike itself. There is nothing like having a giant white seamless room! This makes post so much easier!
Working with the Profoto lights, I can say they have a LOT OF POWER! Much more than my Alien Bees, however, they provided very inconsistent power across the shots. I think this can be attributed to them being rentals and being used and abused for years. In comparison to my Bees, they put out much more power, feel better built, and are very light and compact, instead of being a monolight, but the cords are really heavy and bulky, and probably expensive too! I can see where a new set of Profoto strobes would be great for a permanent professional studio setup, if you are doing a lot of volume, with large subjects or groups, and need to impress clients or art directors, but for all other situations, especially on location I think Alien Bees with a Vagabond are tough to beat.
Back to the shoot, we wrapped it up, grabbed some lunch at Lila’s (a cuban palomilla steak smothered in a mountain of fries) and headed back home. I dumped the RAW images into Lightroom on my Macbook and started to review the images and see our handiwork. It is incredible how much easier the post production is for a series of images when you take the photo shoot is done under professional conditions. These images were dead on, no need to crop out any unwanted areas, or clone any stray objects in the frame. The makeup on the models wasa perfect, and their skin looked great, the lighting was perfect, and all of the shots had near perfect exposure and color but for the ones where the strobes did not fire at full power. Lightroom made fixing these a snap. I had an idea for one of these Dave Hill High-pass composite images, and I grabbed an old jpeg (rather small) that I snapped off at Bayside and dropped it on the canvas in Photoshop. I then had to transform the large image from the shoot to fit into this one. I knew I would be giving up a lot of resolution and quality, but this was a concept, I could go re-shoot the backdrop again if it looked good. Then I used the background eraser tool to remove the white seamless background from the studio image, and let me tell you, this was SO EASY with these images because the white background was evenly exposed pure white. Then I dropped that into a layer on top of the background, flipped it mirror image horizontal for composition, and I ran a high-pass filter on it and also did some sharpening, The resulting image was not bad for a first try! Let me know what you think!
All in all, it was a great experience, and I think I came away with a wealth of knowlege I did not have going in. So if you ever hear Kempo on the radio, or on MTV, check out his album or website, and see the images we produced for him!
Keep on Shooting.
