Campfire Yells
special thanks for bkaldorf Pittsburgh, (US) & N.S.Silwa
To start the new year off I figured I’d do another beginning to
end post on a recent personal project I completed. As visual
communicators, I think it is incredibly important to hone your vision
through the use of personal projects. After all, if you don’t exercise
your vision how can you expect to obtain stellar results on your clients
work?
Step 1. Initial sketch.
I always begin with a very rudimentary sketch of what it is I’m
trying to accomplish. In the immortal words of Doc Brown, “Please
excuse the crudity of this model, I didn’t have time to build it to
scale or to paint it.”
Concept sketch for the camfire stories photoshoot
I know, I’m a regular picasso right? Anywho, from here I start
fleshing out the particulars; models, lighting, wardrobe etc. For this
particular project I had people already in mind, so it was just a matter
of convincing them that they wanted to do it:) Luckily I have
wonderful friends who like to see my imagination come to life so they
were more than willing to help me out. The biggest problem was going to
be the location. I wasn’t keen on carting my entire studio setup out
to the middle of a campsite, so I decided to bring the campsite to the
studio. It was a full day of prep work to build the site, but it was
totally worth it. This way I had complete control of the lighting and
the models would be much more comfortable (being that it was already the
middle of October in the north east). The only thing that I wasn’t
able to replicate in the studio would be the background, that would have
to be photographed outside at a later date.
The lighting for this shot was somewhat complex. I really needed
to replicate the glow of the campfire as much as possible without being
overly lit. We ended up going with 8 lights, all of them gelled with
various orange and yellow mylar. The lights on the two boys were up
high and at 45 degree angle while our scout leader was lit from a strobe
hidden in the campfire. the highlights were created by two low strobes
on either side, which were flagged. The whole scene was then bathed in
fill light with a magnum reflector.
lighting diagram for campfire setup
The studio shoot itself went off without a hitch. The background was
kept dark so I had an easy time punching it out from the foreground.
That way I could just pop in the correct background at a later date.
image before knocking out the background
From here it was just a matter of photographing the background on
location and popping it in. I chose a spot in a local park that kinda
fit the mood of what I was after. From here I just waited for the right
time of day, set up two strobes, and fired away.
background shot, park near my studio
Once I combined the two images together, it was just a simple
matter of my regular post production set up along with adding all of the
eyes digitally (I took a bunch of photos of my cats eyes!) and voila,
the final image!
finished campfire stories image
