Motion Blur Background on Cover Shot

posted in: Lighting, Portrait, Teaching | 0

The owner of the company One on One Marketing, Nick Greer, really wanted employees involved in the photo shoot. I still wanted the attention to be on 1 person on the cover. I decided to have a bunch of employees play basketball in the background and use a long exposure. I had to make sure Nick didn’t move and that the people in the back ALL moved. It took a few attempts to nail it just the way I wanted, but I think it went well. The magazine got him on the cover, he got lots of employes in the shot 🙂 The basketball court is on the top floor of their building.

Equipment: Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III with a 50mm 1.4 @ f4.0. 1/12 sec. ISO 100 on a Manfrotto tripod. Main light Elinchrom strobe with a white reflective umbrella + a California Sun Bounce reflector with it’s white side as a fill on his rigth side.

Here is a short video clip the editor Briana Stewart shot during one of our attempts.

In this shot we let Nick Greer blend with the crowd and show some if his great staff.

It was used as a 2-page spread to open the article. We knew this when we shot it and made sure nobody would end up in the crease, etc. Existing light + 1 LED 900 lamp to add more light to the room and especially to the people. Camera: Canon EOS 1Ds M III with a Canon 20-35mm f 2.8 L lens @ 5.0. 1/85sec. ISO 800.

I loved photographing (no, I did not SHOOT him:-) Nick in his office with great window light. We added a LED 160 lamp to get the light more around his face and give us freedom to have him not have to turn towards the window light as much. Lately I have been using daylight LED lamps and use a warm filter if necessary. I can dim them without color change which is one thing I love. I made sure to have peace around Nick’s head and added the water bottle to get the company logo in the shot. LED is such an amazing light source to have added to our choices of light. Camera: Canon EOS 1D Mark III with a 50mm f1.4 at 2.8 and 1/60 sec. ISO 800.

PS. I know you would love more overviews from these shots, but it was such a fast pace job with so many people involved I didn’t feel I could justify using their time on it. Maybe I will have to start bringing an extra person just to do overviews…Let me think about that one.

 

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