Monsters are not Myths band shoot
This weekend, in addition to the baseball photos, I had the pleasure of doing a shoot with my friends Monsters are not Myths. I recently shot them live, which got me thinking about doing a staged shoot. I am really excited about how these turned out! Take a look at the entire main album or the alternates to see a lot more, but these are some highlights.
We shot all around their rehearsal space in South San Francisco. The shots above are in a hallway outside their room; there was another great band rehearsing next to us when we took these shots. This was lit with just one large softbox over my right shoulder. Then we went to another end of the building and found this interesting garage door. This time I wanted to contrast Annie’s hotness with the dudes, just for fun. This was shot with one large softbox on the left, and a small flash pointed at the wall on my right for fill.
Then we ventured outside, where there’s a large covered cement patio of sorts. We set up a bare light (in a cone, of course) on the left and a softbox on the right for some fill. Balancing the shadows on the wall with the drama on the subjects was a fun little puzzle; I wanted to get some serious contrast. But before we got going, we got everyone covered in safflower oil, and I took some sports eye black (which I’d actually bought for the baseball shoot) and got their shirts, bodies, and hair a little dirty-looking. Then I had them go run around in the rain for a couple of minutes to get kind of wet–the water beads up and looks like sweat. I was back against some bushes shooting this, and needed to get down really low, so I would up laying sideways on my back on a box, holding a ring flash in my left hand and my camera in my right–which wound up making me pretty sore the next day, actually. But all worth it–they look suitably epic.
Finally, I wanted to try a closeup that would show all of their faces. We put Annie on a box in the front (to get her the right height) and switched the locations of the lights so the bare key light was on the right side–and I think we temporarily turned off the soft box for this one. I put on my 100mm lens for this (a lot of the rest had been shot with my 16-35 to give that epic wide-angle view) and set it to f22, which worked with the light and also gave me the necessary depth of field. I couldn’t back up any more because of the bushes at the side of the patio but I was literally laying into them to get the distance I needed.
Finally we turned the box on its side, and stood all of them in front of it to get a blown-out background shot, with the key light pointing at them from slightly to my right.
With all of that lighting set up, we had to get sexy individual shots, too. We’d already done Annie’s inside–love her in the dress looking foxy. Tyler was just so oily–and so known for taking his shirt off during performances. I put Evan in front of the softbox, which highlighted the contrast and grubbiness we’d created on the t-shirt. For Nick, we simply HAD to back-light his hair and beard–which also gave an opportunity to get a nice shot of his breath (it was getting cold out there!).
My good friend Sam kicked ass at the lighting–what a tremendous pleasure having someone so awesome be there for this. We’ve had some great photo outings before and I’m sure there are more to come.
Thanks to MANM–you guys rock! Hope these help you get where you’re going that much sooner…
The big day has finally arrived. The Gabriel McClelland Show with Gabriel McClelland will begin airing Thursday mornings from 6 to 9 (Pacific) on KZSU 90.1 FM. And you can 
, coming out shortly thereafter, which of course I bought. Most of it is highly orchestral (so I missed the tasty jazz piano) but the last track is an excruciatingly beautiful Joe-plus-George duet of the title song, made all the more poignant since Joe passed away a few years later.