Don't Dress for Dinner
OK, so it’s the Grimsby Telegraph and I’ve had my images published in it numerous times over the years but this one is a bit special. Firstly it’s a full page in colour and secondly it features my wife Helen as she is about to start a run of Don’t Dress for Dinner. For those of you who don’t know, Helen is also my Make Up Artist and Stylist and goes under the name of Pinklady on many of the modelling websites. (Pinklady – apples – get it?) She is also a bit of a luvy and is often treading the boards or directing at our local theatre. She says she gets it from our daughter who is currently in her final year of an acting degree at East 15.
Anyway, back to the pic. I always shoot promo shots for the theatre and as this play is set in a stylish barn conversion just outside of Paris I thought we’d borrow the local kitchen shop for the shoot. Studio 21 of Louth were very helpful and let us choose which set to use, I love the bright colours of this one and got my lights all set-up then realised every surface was highly reflective! Challenge number one was to position the lights so there was no glare from the worktops and unit doors, challenge number two was getting everyone lit evenly.
I put my SB900 on a stand to camera to camera left, about 6′ high with a white shoot through brolly. It was set well back towards the units at the rear so it was firing across the scene. My SB800 was to camera right again fired through a brolly but at a slightly lower height to fill the shadows. I had to carefully feather this one to avoid reflection in the wall units. I shot it with the D90 instead of the D2x because of the on camera flash which controls the speedlights via Nikon CLS. Normally I switch off the on-camera flash by setting it in the camera menu but for this I wanted a bit for direct fill so left switched on but at 2/3 stop below the key.
I often use the Nikkor 18-200 VR for these type of shots, the wide zoom range really helps when working on fast paced shoot (we had half an hour to get about 5 shots) and the lack of wide aperture wasn’t an issue as I new I needed a fairly long depth of field. This was f8.0 at 1/125, 35mm, ISO 200. The camera was set on manual and I spot metered from one of the faces.
The final image was manipulated in Photoshop to give some real “pop” to the colours, I use a mixture of layer blending techniques whcih I shall blog about another time. I’ve found when shooting for the local papers the colour needs to be “hyper real” as the printing tends to wash things out a bit.
If any one wants to see Helen, Bruce, Clive, Janet plus Kate and Robert who were cropped from the image, the play is on all next week at the Riverhead Theatre, Louth. Full details on their website: www.riverheadtheatre.co.uk
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