Makeup, styling and video (her first ever) by Tracie Cotta. Video shot entirely on iPhone 3GS.
Tracie set up this shoot with Micah, choosing “silent film” as our look for the shoot. We decided on Old Town Orange as the location… having an older look than most areas in Orange County. We also decided to add an “environmental portrait” as well as some fashion shots of Micah in his backyard.
People often ask us to explain in more detail our lighting setups… and I’ve already had a few requests on this shoot. So I’ll go a little more detailed than usual and include some crudely drawn diagrams done in Skitch. They look like they were done by a child, but they should explain the lighting pretty well… so don’t complain.
We started the shoot with the “environmental portrait”… it was a simple setup right in Micah’s bedroom in front of his DVD collection and assortment of figurines. We set up two 580 flashes on wireless triggers opposite each other pointing directly at Micah, and an Alien Bees AB800 with a narrow 10? grid pointed up at the poster.
Diagram:
After that we moved on the the fashion shots, using the backyard and existing garden gnome as background and prop. For these we set up two Alien Bees AB800s as back/side lights and an ABR800 ring flash on camera.
Diagram:
Before leaving the house we decided to take one more shot out in the front of the house. This shot was lit entirely by the street lamp out front… with backlighting by the security lights behind the house at a nearby restaurant.
Micah then got dressed and Tracie did his makeup… and we took off to downtown Orange for the whole point of the shoot day… the silent film shots.
The first two shots were lit with a single 580EX flash… held by Tracie… set to 105mm zoom.
Diagram:
Diagram:
We then put Micah up on a staircase which was already backlit by a single incandescent bulb… while Tracie crouched down on the bottom step and used a small flashlight to light his face from below… for a nice creepy portrait.
The last couple shots were just done with existing light which were mostly provided by street lamps with a little fill from storefront window lights on the closeup.
All in all it was a successful shoot… and the music Tracie chose for the video conveys the mood of the portraits extremely well. We hope you were all able to enjoy them and learn a little about our lighting at the same time.
-Vu
