It’s been a couple of weeks since I shot at Boulderwelt. It was a fantastic experience, although it left me with a nasty cold and a sore throat (not from the cold). I ended up with close to 60 awesome participants and hundreds of images I’m really excited about. Regarding the future of these images, I’m currently working on a couple of ideas although I’m not yet completely sure what final shape they will take.

Setup revisited

The basic setup worked pretty much the way I’d planned, with one key light through a softbox on the subject and one strobe firing into a white reflector which in turn reflects the light onto the background. Note: I switched from a white styrofoam to a big white Lastolite reflector as it was easier to transport.  I triggered the strobes with the D90′s internal flash gun which worked great for the most part. For reasons I haven’t figured out yet, sync reliability kept decreasing as the day went on, which bugged me a lot. It started great with maybe one misfire out of 40 shots until late at night it fell below 50% (!). Still unsure what was happening there, changing batteries on the strobes didn’t help either. (I wish I’d had a couple of Pocket Wizards for this gig, they are definitely on my shopping list once I’ve got enough money…) Note: I haven’t confirmed this, but one reason could be that the D90′s IR trigger output level decreases with decreasing camera battery power. (I didn’t change batteries on the D90, only on the strobes…)

Pictures to the People

The fundamental idea of this project was that everybody should be getting their images in full resolution for their own use. I didn’t know how many people it would be beforehand, but I knew I would have to be prepared for getting out pictures to a lot of people quickly and efficiently. I’d worked as an assistant for a Munich based studio recently where we had a day-long casting for an advertising campaign. In order to keep track of some 40 applicants, we had them hold up a piece of paper with their name and contact information and took a picture of each. It’s a great way to keep track of people you photograph, since you’ve got a connection between their faces and their contact information right there with the images you take. I decided to steal that idea, so I had everyone write down their email addresses on a piece of paper and took a picture of them before moving on to the “real” images. It still took me a whole day to get all of the final images out, but that was mostly waiting for the files to upload on my server. (Everyone got a download link for their zipped pictures)

Last Thoughts

As I’m browsing through the finished images, I’m overwhelmed by the many great people I’ve met in the course of these two days and how much fun the whole affair has been. One question I’ve been asked many times was “why?”.  As I told the people who asked me during the shoot, when you’re trying to make money with your photography, you run the risk of losing touch with the reasons why you started shooting in the first place. You stop shooting simply for the fun of creating something cool. And creating something cool was the main objective for this project. I wasn’t even sure what exactly would come out of it. But I knew that with some planning and a handful of great people, this could really turn into something nice.

Of course this doesn’t mean that I would mind if some kind of paying job came from this. Ever since turning my hobby into a profession, the basic idea of advertising myself wherever possible is present in the background and I don’t mind that. It’s part of being a professional photographer and I accepted that as part of the job. But the real reason for this project remains the pure fun of creating something. Of going out and doing something instead of sitting at home and thinking about doing something.

So, why not?

Last week, I photographed Cathy, a yoga teacher from Munich, Germany. Before the birth of her son, we’d talked about making yoga images to be used for her website, flyer etc. After having her son, she got back into shape super-fast and called me up a few weeks ago to set up the shoot. It was perfect timing because I’d been asked to be holiday replacement at Munich’s Aidenbach Studios, and -provided the studio wasn’t rented out that day- could do my own thing there. The studio’s owners, Photographers Bodo Mertoglu and Stephan Stuemer also allowed me to use their gear, which meant I had all the freedom to really do this right. (Broncolor lighting, pocket wizards, softboxes, you name it…)

Cathy wanted a clean, “creamy” look to the images, so we decided to do the whole thing on a white background. For the lighting, I wanted to do a clean and simple job, with one key light and one rim shot, both rather soft. I went with two softboxes with Broncolor heads for main and rim lights. I set up another two Broncolor heads to bring up the background to white and positioned them so as not to interfere with the shot. I also put up a styrofoam wall (see sketch below) to shield the lens from the rim lights. (Be extra careful with lights aimed back in the direction of the camera, this can really kill your images without any hope of saving them later in photoshop!)

Note: Every time you are going to have people running around at a shoot, it’s important to minimise the risk of someone tripping over cables, running into tripods or stepping onto smaller pieces of equipment. Mistakes happen, but with a little extra thinking most of them won’t turn into a catastrophe.

So keep in mind that:

- all cables should have enough slack, so that even if someone does stumble over it, they don’t take your whole lighting rig down with them; (the same applies to Laptop cables, camera sync chords etc.)

- never leave a studio flash without either the cap or a reflector on! (A banged up reflector costs much less than a broken flash bulb!)

- don’t leave small stuff lying around (Pocket Wizards, Lenses, etc etc)

-make sure you set up your power packs conveniently; no sense in having to tear down the whole setup just to adjust output levels on your strobes!

One thing that worried me in the beginning was what to do with the floor. If your subject stands in a completely white room, you run the danger of making your subject look like it “floats” in space without anything to anchor the viewer’s eye. Aside from that, the floor would have needed a paint job and I’m basically a lazy bastard… After some thinking (something I’m not particularly good at) I remembered a huge white, slightly mirrored board that we had used in a shoot I’d assisted on earlier. Luckily it was still in the studio, so I put it on two tables and build some kind of a stage for Cathy to stand on. (Actually Cathy’s boyfriend Daxi helped out with the putting-it-on-the-table part, as the damn thing weighs about a ton and is a nightmare to carry around…)

The makeshift stage turned out to be working great, giving a nice reflection without reflecting any undesirable objects like softboxes or myself and especially without breaking under the weight of two people standing on it…

More images from this gig and other recent work coming soon, right now I’m giving the main website  a slight makeover, so stay tuned!