{"id":592,"date":"2011-02-05T05:53:44","date_gmt":"2011-02-05T12:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aboutrc.com\/?p=592"},"modified":"2011-02-05T05:53:44","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T12:53:44","slug":"shooting-sister-kill-cycle-w-westcott-strobelites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/?p=592","title":{"rendered":"Shooting Sister Kill Cycle w\/ Westcott Strobelites"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nWhen you walk into your work on a Saturday afternoon, and you see these guys getting a music video recorded, you NEED to start a conversation! A few months ago that was just the scenario. They’re in the process of working out a video idea, and I was literally running in to pick up something that I had left in the office the day before. The guys had a very stylized look – something that I always love to shoot. In a few minutes, cards in hand, I was showing them the work that I was capable of doing, and talking to them about “I have ideas, and concepts.. and I’d think you’d be great for them”<\/p>\n

Check out the rest of the story at the jump..
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Scrambling for a Location<\/strong>
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Truth is, I had -one- idea. My buddy Kathy had a local Metal shop (think blacksmithing) in the area that had some cool look to it, with fires in cans and stuff, but the location was loaned out to someone previously – leaving the owners not really excited to do it again. I kept contact with the lead singer, Raven as I kept my eye out for any other locations. <\/p>\n

As luck would have it, i’d make an acquaintance with a lady who curates an amazing location in Tampa. I quickly talked to her about my idea, and how excited I was to work with this group. She immediately jumped on board, and I was back with a location. <\/p>\n

Let’s Shoot It With Westcott Strobelites<\/strong>
\nAnother thing that I wanted to do was take out my set of Strobelites from FJ Westcott<\/a>. Sometimes I think even I get a little guilty of dragging out a bunch of big lights into a shoot, and I wanted to see if I can do them with lights that dont break the bank in the process. <\/p>\n

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I used their 3 light kit and had a main light to camera left with a softbox and grid combo. To the left and right of the band (off to the top right and left of the frame) I had the two other lights with grids and barndoors. The grids allowed me to concentrate the light better, while the barndoors allowed me to control how much spill I would get back to the camera. <\/p>\n

To give it a little extra pizazz, I ran a small Fog machine to low camera left. I would wait for the fog to get ready in the unit, then have an assistant quickly shoot out a bit of fog. After about 5 seconds, i’d have her stop, and I’d shoot a few frames while the fog was around. Because of the temperature of the place, the fog would quickly lift, so we needed to give this a few tries. I did like the result however. <\/p>\n

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Now, for the picture with the blue in it and the one right above of vii (seven), we went with a little different setup. Here, we had one light flown high camera left on a grid- at a very low power. This would allow me to be able to mix up the ambient light of the red bulb over the door with a blueish light on the individual – for a cool effect. Two speedlights (SB800) were set to the left and right of the scenes with different color Gels to give me that color in the area. <\/p>\n

What I like about shooting bands like this is that it’s the equivalent of finger-painting. Because of their artistic look, you can really go outside of the box in terms of trying creative things, which really get your idea juices flowing. I love being able to try different things behind the camera – even if they don’t seem to work. The last set that I shot for the band didn’t use any Flash, and was with longer than normal shutter speeds. <\/p>\n

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For the image above, I had Raven open his mouth, point his head up in the air, and on the count of 3 shake his head from side to side, while I made a 1 second exposure. I thought the effect was fitting for the type of shoot we were doing. <\/p>\n

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\nThis shot was also cool and simple to setup. Basically, vii needed to hold very very still while I made the frame using available light. This is going to be part of a series of images that i’m making for a project.. but more on that later. <\/p>\n

A lot of the crunchiness that you see in the shots here was attributed to shooting the set in JPG on the Nikon. Rather than have a lof of the raw capture sharpness pulled out, I figured i’d let the camera do a lot of the heavy lifting in this instance and crunch them up for me. I could then add a little more to areas I thought needed it with either the NIK suite<\/a> or with Topaz Adjust<\/a> for some background work. <\/p>\n

Again, great thanks to Sister Kill Cycle for the shoot.. had a blast!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you walk into your work on a Saturday afternoon, and you see these guys getting a music…","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9,6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-592","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blog","7":"category-featured","8":"category-shoots","9":"cs-entry"},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":685,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions\/685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}