I did a really fun shoot with a band called D NOVA at the start of May. We came up with a nifty story to base the pictures around including an alien spaceship (complete with smoke and search light) and pulled it all off with a few small flashes and a tin of Pringles.
The story was this:
the gameboy heads partied a bit too hard after a gig and Dan Nova (the front man) was beside himself with what to do with them (the first picture, above). Then he tried to drag them into shape, then lastly the tables turned as the two gameboy heads tied him up on a roof-top and held him in place whilst an 8-bit alien space ship prepared to beam him up!
As you can see in the first image (at the top of the post), I went for a dark alley with a pink glow from a club, a street light illuminating the sick and a separate light on Dan Nova.
We shot this at about 7pm with lots of light to work in so I began with a shutter speed of 1/200 (the maximum speed with a flash on a Canon 550D) to keep it dark. As I only had one pair of Pocket Wizard plus IIs I had to start with my brightest light and trigger the rest of them in optical slave mode from this light. In this shot the brightest was the back light, a Nikon SB26 (in fact, all my flashes are Nikon SB26s, about £45 on ebay and really good!) gelled pink and sat on the floor facing up and to the left wall. Although it would have usually made more sense to next sort out the light on Dan Nova, this composition is based around the sick on the floor so I moved onto illuminating that as if it were under a street light so everyone could get into position relative to this sick. I had made a snoot especially for this shoot from a tin of Pringles suspended on the end of a 3 metre pole:
The 'snoot on a pole' idea actually came about as a way to simulate the alien space ship search light used in the third shot and it just so happened to work nicely resting against a wall for this first shot. Next I lit Dan Nova with another SB26 through a 33" umbrella. I didn't want the light to fall much further than his face so for this reason my assistant held the umbrella collapsed and right in his face (stood on the wall you see bottom right).
As I had eliminated the ambient light with the 1/200 shutter speed the gameboy faces were now completely silhouetted. Another SB26 on the floor camera left on the lowest setting 1/64 took care of them and the whole shot came together!
Here's a little behind the scenes of just the first shot:
The second shot was fairly simple: umbrella into Dan Nova's face from above camera right, a flash on the floor gelled pink between Dan Nova and the first gameboy and a backlight on the floor behind the female gameboy.
The last shot came together really well! Again we used the Pringle can snoot on the 3 metre pole, this time to represent the search light from the alien space ship. A 33" umbrella was held near Dan Nova's face for a bit of fill and another flash was on the floor just camera right to give a bit of a rim/separation light on the female gameboy. There was actually another flash on the floor on the left to give separation on the male gameboy but there were lots of drunk tourists around taking in the skyline whilst we shot this and someone must have got in it's way or something. All the smoke was burning incense sticks shot in my flat against a black towel and comped in.
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