Faux Paparazzi on the Backlot of Warner Bros.
Mark Jenkins
In the middle of shooting LA Fashion Week these past two weeks I received a call from a Riverside-based fashion designer Charmaine J Rodriguez. She was looking for a photographer to shoot her designs with models and expensive sports cars. The location, the back lot of Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. Not having first-hand knowledge of the location, nor time to research it, I decided to take along a single mono-block flash unit with battery pack and octabox, and as a fallback solution I also packed my Canon speedlights and the Calumet Octabox Speedbox Hex 21 I had rented from PROtog Rentals in Costa Mesa, CA.
Canon 5D MkII, 24-70mm 2.8 MkII L-series, 580 Speedlight with Calumet Octabox Speedbox Hex 21 attached to a Canon Hot Shoe 2 extension.
ISO 400, f-stop 3.5 – 5.6, shutter speed from 1/30th to 1/250th with Speedlight set to high-speed shutter sync and ETTL.
I had used the Speedbox the entire week prior and was very impressed with it’s ease of use. More so I was thrilled with the quality of light it was giving me in my backstage and Red Carpet images. So, when my assistant had had enough of following me around and manually positioning the heavy mono-block with a 52″ Octobox and dragging around the battery pack, I broke out the speedlight and gave her a much needed break.
As it turned out, the small size combined with superb light quality provided me with the best possible solution. In close it gave me a fall off that’s similar to what you might find in images shot by paparazzi. Given the subject matter, girls with expensive sportscars, I put myself into that frame of mind and directed the model accordingly. To my delight the combination of the smaller light source, relative distance from the subject, and angle of view of my camera produced some fun images – and most importantly a happy client.
by Michael Seeley
I'd like to thank Michael & Jereé of Äremis Studios for supporting PROtog Rentals. If you would like to see the resulting image from this shoot, as well as other projects that they are involved in, please check out: