A Photoshoot
Last weekend I did a photoshoot for my Brother. He runs a Martial Arts School with his wife and they were wanting some photos that they could use for various purposes. They wanted some photo's that they could use on their website and also in printed material that could "storyboard" a Class and show a bit about some of the sorts of activites that are done.
I had been planning this shoot for quite some time, we discussed it several times as to how and what I would try and shoot. It is not like I get the opportunity to do this every day as they are a 2 1/2 hour plane trip away from me.
My homework included getting a few snapshots of their Dojo (or training hall) and knowing what I was up against. There are a lot of things in their location that worked against me.
The building is basically a big industrial shed that they have re-modelled to suit their needs - very high tin roof, walls that are only painted up to about 3metres, leaving another 3 metres of grey concrete bricks on the walls. The biggest "problem was the Lighting - large overhead Halogen Lamps.
Knowing what I was up against, I knew that I would need to use flash and probably would need to shoot faster than 100 ISO to get what was required. They have 3 classes that go for about an hour each and run from about 5pm until about 8pm.
I took care to do all the preperation that I could - making sure that I had all my batteries charged, including a couple of spare sets for my Flashes and my PSD so I could backup my flash cards onsite If I needed to.
We get there about an hour early and I spent most of this time setting up and making sure I had everything where I needed it. I took a handful of test shots and set up Both Cameras ready for the classes to begin.
I settled on shooting at 200 ISO and 1/60sec using a large Aperture. I set the Camera up in manual mode and set up 2 Remote (wireless) flashes on a couple of Tripods so I could move them around as required.
For the shoot, I used my 11-22mm lens as the primary lens and on my 2nd camera I had the 14-54mm lens. Once they started, I was pretty busy getting as many shots as I could and ended up with around 300 shots.
We are just starting to go thru the photos and the first cut has narrowed the list down to about 120 photos that "tell the story" My next task is to go thru the short list and see how many of them that I can actually use.
