Womanwise 10
02/11/09 22:23 Filed in: Technique
Carolyn Pasea was in a confessional mood.
“I’ve haven’t done this before,” she said as I put my gear down.
“Actually, I’ve never done anything like this before,” she continued. “I’m usually behind the camera.”
Remembering the slight quaver in her voice as she tried to laugh her way through my plan for the shoot when we spoke the day before, I smiled and said, “I thought so.”
I’d hoped to photograph the shy music producer and manager framed with the stage rigging she spends so much of her professional life working around, but there were no shows happening. I tried to coax her into getting us access to a storage facility, hoping that I would be able craft something out of the raw materials.
That proved to be impossible, though I suspect that the novice subject was trying to keep things uninvolved.
So here I was, in the bandroom that you walk into when you enter the offices of Question Mark Entertainment. It’s a green room, with splotches of dark, jagged sound dampening material on the walls. There’s a wild scattering of musical equipment and amplification gear crammed up against the walls on three sides, my gear was on a deep dark couch at the other end.
Along one long wall were floor to ceiling mirrors that provided an artificially deep, reflected view of the chaos of wires, speakers, keyboards and odd knobbed boxes arrayed around the drum kit in the centre of the room.
I took the tour of the rest of the offices, but this room was going to be it for the photos, the best opportunity to pull together the subject with her work.
The photo that really demanded some planning was the first one. I didn’t much care for the way it got used in the paper to accompany the story, so that’s the one I’m going to break down here.
I got approval to yank a heavy speaker box around the room.
It would be the box that I’d be using for to make some height for the shot that got used on the cover of the magazine, but it began its life as a prop as the platform Carolyn would be sitting on.
Having set the angle of the shot and the scope of the reflection of the rest of the room, I set my two strobes in umbrellas to first, light the subject, and then to light the section of the room that would be reflected in the mirror.
Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery
“I’ve haven’t done this before,” she said as I put my gear down.
“Actually, I’ve never done anything like this before,” she continued. “I’m usually behind the camera.”
Remembering the slight quaver in her voice as she tried to laugh her way through my plan for the shoot when we spoke the day before, I smiled and said, “I thought so.”
I’d hoped to photograph the shy music producer and manager framed with the stage rigging she spends so much of her professional life working around, but there were no shows happening. I tried to coax her into getting us access to a storage facility, hoping that I would be able craft something out of the raw materials.
That proved to be impossible, though I suspect that the novice subject was trying to keep things uninvolved.
Along one long wall were floor to ceiling mirrors that provided an artificially deep, reflected view of the chaos of wires, speakers, keyboards and odd knobbed boxes arrayed around the drum kit in the centre of the room.
I took the tour of the rest of the offices, but this room was going to be it for the photos, the best opportunity to pull together the subject with her work.
The photo that really demanded some planning was the first one. I didn’t much care for the way it got used in the paper to accompany the story, so that’s the one I’m going to break down here.
I got approval to yank a heavy speaker box around the room.
Having set the angle of the shot and the scope of the reflection of the rest of the room, I set my two strobes in umbrellas to first, light the subject, and then to light the section of the room that would be reflected in the mirror.
Related: The Womanwise Virtual Gallery
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