A per­sonal project borne of the Cre­ative­Live ses­sions men­tioned in my last post led to the cre­ation of a monthly project. This month’s offer­ing is “Junk Store Super­hero” and con­sisted of a trip to sev­eral second-hand stores, and an after­noon shoot­ing pho­tos out and about in the city of Calgary..

Star­ring in this install­ment was Von­Bon­bon (“V” for short) and her mild man­nered alter-ego Tasha. Makeup by Amanda Cook and hair by Mike Lindee.

I’d been itch­ing to get out­side and shoot for a while, and real­ized very quickly the lim­its of small flashes again..   Mak­ing use of our stu­dio expe­ri­ence in Seat­tle was help­ful, but I did fight a fair bit to bal­ance nat­ural light..  A chal­lenge for sure!

The setup changed for as we moved around, how­ever for the most part I used a sin­gle strobe shot into a small­ish (40″??) umbrella.   Lenses were a 50mm and 90mm f/1.8’s and a 70–200 f/2.8 sat on a D700.

Since this was all an exper­i­ment things went right, annnnd..  things went wrong.  Some key take­aways for this shoot:

Long days:

We started in the after­noon and went pretty darn late.  Look­ing for inspi­ra­tion for the cos­tume and style in the junk store is great, but sig­nif­i­cantly increases the length of the day. I’d split the pur­chas­ing and shoot­ing up in to two days in the future.

Food:

Food is always appre­ci­ated when you’re going for any­thing more than an hour.  I had enough water, pow­er­ade, and munchies for us to set­tle our grum­bling tum­mies.  That was money well spent.

Have a plan:

The plan with this shoot was to have no plan.  This was a bad idea. It made things pretty helter-skelter when we actu­ally got to shoot­ing and reac­tive rather than proac­tive when it came to work­ing in spe­cific loca­tions. I feel this shows in the pho­tos.  Hav­ing a few spe­cific shots (or at least a solid loca­tion) in mind to get started is a much bet­ter idea than ‘let’s see what we can find’

Con­tin­u­ing on with the ben­e­fit of a good plan, as the pho­tog­ra­pher hav­ing a clearer idea of what I actu­ally wanted from the shoot would have also made things smoother in that I could have pro­vided bet­ter direction.

My model was incred­i­bly patient and will­ing to take direc­tion, but I (in hind­sight) feel like I was rely­ing too much on her to just come up with superhero-ish poses and sit­u­a­tions which was a bit unfair.

Tasha did a great job of doing the ‘model’ thing and the result was most of the images came across more like a fash­ion shoot than a super­hero in a spe­cific sit­u­a­tion.  This was not inten­tional, and the results are pleas­ing, but not accept­able if we’re look­ing at this from the per­spec­tive of a com­mer­cial shoot (where, to be fair, we’d have a plan..  See where this is going? :)

Have an assistant

Hav­ing an assis­tant to help out with lights, bags and logis­tics would have been incred­i­bly help­ful..  Mike and Amanda did a great job of lend­ing a hand but unfor­tu­nately weren’t able to stay ’till the end of the day so I ended up haul­ing gear and try­ing to focus on what I wanted to shoot..  I’m not good enough for that to be a 100% slam dunk yet.  Work­ing on it.

Request for feedback:

So there ya go.  As always I’m open to feed­back on the shots and the com­men­tary above.  How do y’all think this turned out? Where could I make improve­ments? What would you have done dif­fer­ently? Also… How do the col­ors look?   I’ve just dug the color cal­i­bra­tor out and every­thing grey looks kinda pink now…  :0/

Here are a few of the shots for you to see..

Final Images