Second shot from the recent HTBM shoot. This image is part of a series of 4 – each with different band member in the forefront of the shot. I figured I would start with vocalist Bin and work on from there.
In this post I will be explaining in detail how this series was lit, the thought process behind them and turning it into reality.
Here There Be Monsters are by far the best live band in Brighton. It always blows me away how much energy they give out and I don’t think I have ever seen a gig where the crowd has not going completely insane.
vocalist and natural front-man Bin is a dominating force when on-stage and never leaves anyone out of the proceedings. This domineering and heavy-weight delivery is really what I wanted to hit home with these images, to achieve this I knew that it was not going to be a case of balancing lights to get even exposures, quite the opposite in fact. I wanted to get a jarring juxtapose between the light and dark side of both their personalities and their music.
Fire It Up
I had the extreme pleasure of having Kevin Mason AKA DarkDaze, assisting me on this shoot, I love the way he gets people to pop from their surroundings with his lighting, so after some brief discussion and trying to ignore the guys antics behind us we got to setting up the lighting on our main subject.
Using some know-how from the Studio Lighting course which I took last summer with the aforementioned DarkDaze, I wanted to have the key light for the image hit Bin bang on the left side of his face pushing a really heavy shadow across the right. I recently posted a test shot based on this concept, shown below.
We pushed around a bare Nikon SB800 on a stand positioned just out of the frame at about 8ft in the air until it was hitting Bin right in the face. my trust VAL then tweaked the zoom head position of the strobe which behaves similar to a snoot.
Adjusting the zoom head refines the beam of light, the further it is set the more refined the central point becomes, this is because it is intended to travel a further distance, winding the zoom head back disperses the light in a wider arc.
Happy with the intensity of the light, I set about position Bin in the best way to not only create heavy shadows across his body and face but also to marry him up with what was going on in the background – the rest of the band.
Can I Get a Hell Yeah From The Back?
Now our main subject was set up, it was time to get busy with the rear. The concept for these shots was suggested by the band, and I thought it sounded bloody brilliant, I was really stoked the second I looked through the view finder and saw how it was unfolding because it just looks badass.
Whoever was stood on our front marker was the subject, the rest of the band were then positioned in the back of the shot to acknowledge they exist but not to detract from our focal point. Below you can see a test shot, this time with drummer Pete in the foreground, where the rear strobe had the zoom set too wide. This has caused the too much of the scenery to illuminate and hasn’t pulled the focus back onto the rear subjects.
We were shooting at ISO 100, 1/125 and 5.6 / 6.7, using a 70mm Sigma lens – my favourite in the bag. This middle ground aperture mixed with the focal distance meant that we were able to throw the guys at the back out of focus enough for the subject in the foreground to really pop. However I didn’t want to completely lose them to insignificance.
Using another Nikon Speedlight, this time a 600, we worked on creating a similar lighting for the 3 guys who would be in the back. Amazingly in one of those comical geek scenarios, both myself and Kev suggested half the power of our main light. It was bang on. Again Kev set about tweaking the zoom head to get coverage on just the guys rather than the background until it was looking really fresh in the camera.
One Step Forward – Two Steps Back
Finally we set the flashes back up to use Nikon’s Wireless CLS system to take the shots and hit the shutter. The rear flash didn’t fire. At first I thought that the sun, which was starting to creep through the underground car park we were in was interfering with the trigger sensor. It turned out to be because the sensor was on the opposite side of the flash head to what was visible from the camera.
To work around this Kev held a silver reflector behind the strobe, it picked up the trigger flashes from the camera and successfully fired the SB600. I actually think that standing with the brolly in position also helped flag off some of the light shaping it tighter into the group.
Shoot Summary
Nikon D80 ISO100, 1/125
Sigma 24-70mm @ 70mm f6.7
SB800, Front subject – zoom head @ 105mm, 1/4 power
SB600, rear subjects – zoom head @ 35mm 1/8 power with silver reflect as trigger and flag
Band – Here There Be Monsters
Lighting assistant – Kevin Mason
