We have not been posting too much of our Commercial work lately. Mainly because we are in the process of setting up a different blog/website for those ventures. Thought it would be cool to see some of the sports/fitness/corporate work we have been doing for CG Arena though. Our imagery has been used all through their websites and marketing campaigns to produce a feel of edge and newness to what they do, which is group fitness in a gym. Very Social, slightly Different take on the traditional Gold’s, 24 Hour type place. We are slightly different too and have been good partners in this way.
Quick breakdown of our lighting setups. For the headshots, we have a speedlight with a red gel firing onto the background wall (it’s normally gray). The main light is an AlienBee with a sport reflector with a 15 degree grid providing the hard edged light from the left with a quick falloff down the torso. The red is a color element we have used in the past and is the dominant color in their Marketing materials so we felt it was appropiate to key it in.
For the more action-y images we had the same basic setup of cross lit lights, this time though with a yellow gel (Straw Amber I believe) to tie in to past photos we have done. For these also went with out grid to keep the action in the spotlight to let the trainers do their thing. Having to plan for a variety of trainers from yoga to hip hop dance we prefer the zone lighting for speed.
Further on that thought. Our plan was preparing for 90 minutes and 12 trainers in 10 minute increments. We setup a headshot station that Josh was photographing and then an action section with Austin on the camera. This provided quick changing ability for looks and feel while providing the client with less fees and hassle. This solution also was respectful to the trainers knowing they would be done in 10 minutes and not having to stand around and wait while every one cycled through. A win for everyone involved!
We will keep everyone posted on the new commercial site, it might be a month or two before it’s live. In the meantime expect a few more commercial posts while we wait.
We say this all the time, but we really love our clients and all of their quirkiness! This pair have a few special talents that deserved a little attention. Scotty Mac is an elite runner for Rogue Athletic Club and Casey Jo is a collegiate gymnastic coach, so yeah both can do things that normal can’t. Scroll down the page a bit and see Scotty Mac doing his steeplechase hurdle over Casey Jo’s scorpion hold handstand. Just wow right?
The other thing we should note is that they have a silly silly sense of humor and are totally on the same wavelength. We will put up facebook the zombie kisses, Monkee walk and dual handstands to show how off-beat from the world they are but in tune with each other.
And lastly, the bright red Volkswagen Vanagon? How could we forget that! Scotty had it nice and polished up for the session and revved it up to make the central Austin to Pflugerville drive in just under 4 hours. Yes, he could have ran faster but this way he did it in style.
Who doesn’t want to act out a few scenes from their favorite books and movies? I certainly look to cinema for lighting and character inspiration. A friend contacted us asking if we could do a Katniss Everdeen session inspired from the Hunger Games series. The family put together the outfits and we took care of the rest! We tried our best to match the lighting from the movies while still moving quick in the hour and a half we had of good light before bedtime. We used Rosco Speed Gels to help us get the fun color contrasts with a Custom White Balance.
How did our young Katniss do on her first styled shoot?
Savanna is Senior from The Woodlands, Texas with Austin, Texas roots. Our session took us through her childhood stomping grounds of the fire truck playground at Barton Springs to the waters of Barton Springs and finished with a picture of her and her dad in front of the Jo’s Coffee shop “I love you so much” graffiti wall. We all had a great time together and Savanna’s sarcasm and mine meshed nicely. Even made a few jokes about the trendy style of alien eyed, plastic skin portraits making the rounds. Check our instagram feed for our joke edit to see what we mean.
Savanna swims and sings though probably not at the same time. We like to incorporate the important elements at this point in a senior’s life. For Savanna, that meant flippers and a microphone with the classic shades. Make sure you let us know what you are interested in for your portraits, it helps to plan your session.
Get out your #2 pencils and write a short comment answering the questions: What is your favorite photo of Savanna? What do you feel about about ouerve? (bonus points if you don’t have to look up what “ouerve” means”)
We have said it before and we will say it again, we love our clients. We will be photographing Shepherd and Megan’s wedding next month at Vintage Villas. While going through our initial consultation with them I discovered that they felt their engagement pictures could be better suited to their personalities. When asked about their personalities it came out that they loved dancing together and were up for about anything. I casually mentioned that I was shooting a series called “Soaked” and they were instantly interested and willing to participate. Oh, and they are also super talented dancers. 2 weeks later we had them in my garage shooting in “rain” on a 60 degree day with 20 mph wind. Megan’s lips were blue after the 45 minute water torture, er, portrait session but she stayed committed throughout. Are these the best of the series so far?
I know you can feel the warmth and passion this couple has for each other and it was shining through even as they were shivering together. Such a pleasure for us to watch them work out their choreography and moves on the spot. Then they would just bring it when the rain came down. Like a hip hop Singin in the Rain!
Let me take a second to run through our process for capturing these Soaked shots. Due to the high wind we setup a 10 foot roll of black background paper inside my garage to shield it from the wind and to put the exposure of the black further into the shadowed ambient. The couple is just in front of the edge of the roof to get the water falloff on, in front and behind them. We have a AlienBee 800 with a small softbox from behind and a LP160 gelled red from the opposite corner. They were both on 1/2 ish power. The key light is an Einstein640 with a sport reflector on full power. That’s because we were at an ambient killing iso50, f18, 1/320th exposure. Cue the rain from Austin on a ladder and Bob’s your uncle. Austin is the premiere provider of rain in Travis County.
We also took some proper engagements before the wet and wild part of the session. Made sure we had enough good ones where we could shoot without hesitation on the rain soaked section. There is this great old barn in my neighborhood that I am always looking to photograph in new ways. Lucky for us the clouds stayed together and dramatic. The vertical photograph above is maybe my favorite of the entire day because it shows Megan and Shepherd in their true state of happiness together, a small slice of time that represents their future time together. And from up close to tiny in the frame, I think these pair well together in a narrative fashion.
Hope you have enjoyed the continuation of our Soaked Series, any requests for what to photograph in the rain next?
–JB
Can you keep a secret? Nothing spreads faster in the world than the words that usually follow that phrase. Well, we kept a secret for 2 years! Joe, the groom and I, kept this photo a secret until yesterday when we delivered his bride a super 1 year anniversary present, prints from this surprise.
To capture these photos I got to live out the life of papparazzi photographer for one afternoon. Joe and I scouted an open area at Zilker Park where he would walk with Kara. I was perched up on the rock outcropping in the middle of Zilker Park with a 600mm lens. I was there about 30 minutes ahead of Joe on the day of the engagement. While waiting I don’t think I have ever shook with excitement more in any shoot I have done. I was really having a hard time holding the camera steady plus the length of the lens made every movement amplified. So I am setup, ready to shoot and spot them driving in once Joe sends a surreptitious text to let me know they were here.
I start tracking them with my sniper lens as they start walking to the pre-determined point. While waiting for them to walk two thing have happened. One, I have a small crowd gathering around me asking what I am shooting with such a monstrous camera setup. Second, just before Kara and Joe get to the meeting point, they start walking back to the car. My mind is racing! Did Joe get Cold Feet? Is Kara onto us? Turns out Kara just wanted to get something from the car. Gah! I am shaking with anticipation at this point. Joe corrals Kara again and they start taking the long way back to the picture spot. My trigger finger has been on the shutter button for 15 minutes at least and I really want to start taking the photos..
They finally get to the spot, Joe drops to one knee and Kara is floored! My shutter starts ripping off frames and the crowd around me, now about 20 people start cheering!
We have the photos, now I have to hide in case Kara looks up to see the crowd 200 yards away. And then for the next two years I have to keep quiet! Couldn’t say anything as we took enagement photos at Zilker Park (wink, wink Joe), or while we photographed their wedding or anything. I am so happy to share them now.
Joe, you get major brownie points for planning, devising and executing this plan. What a great guy so in love with his wife!
We have had tons of fun prepping for Cathie and Andrew’s wedding. Their gallery of photographs includes a Mad Men themed engagement session, a film engagement session, and now this Bridal session on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Gruene, Texas. So much gorgeous to photograph! Cathie brough along her mother and maid of honor to help with the props, the change of shoes, and make sure the dress stayed clean and dry as we positioned her in various spot around Gruene. Special thanks to Gilded Petals for their Floral Crown for the fairy image at the top.
Stay tuned for the wedding photos and as we took those last night and need a little bit of time to process them, hope these stunning bridals tide you over until then!
Not often we photograph a Sister Session and a Senior Session at the same time but Kate and Christa are both graduating this year, Kate from Pflugerville HS (but going to A&M) and Christa from the University of Texas (hook’em!). We bounced around Old Settlers park and discovered a new to me barn with farm implements and a supercool old Chevrolet farm truck. After we used all the daylight we could at Old Settlers we headed into downtown Round Rock where we used some rustic background and broke out our ringflash for the first time in a while. We really had a great time together and their Mom basically had to pull us away from shooting all into the night.
We explored a lot of natural light + reflector settings, which if you follow this blog, we don’t do too much of, but it was the best light available in a few of the places we were so we went with it. With numerous outfit changes we explored a range of facial emotions as well, and really tried to fit the light to the emotion at hand. Really a fun shoot where everything lined up well. I look forward to going through the 400+ photos we took to pick out the super elite because I think there maybe a couple of portfolio winners in the bunch.
Haide and Manny are Soaked! I mean really, how amazing is the passion in their eyes for each other. This session bounced around from so many possibilities. The first plan was for this to be an underwater session, outfits were purchased, pools reserved, stylists were ready to go. Then the storms came in and the lightning forced us out of the pool planning. Figuring there to be rain we were then going to go for a more intimate and muddy in the storm type of session. And then the rain finished hours before we were scheduled to start at 7:30 in the morning. So what did we do? We threw them on the back porch, brewed some hot tea with cinnamon rolls in the oven and we made it rain from a water hose!
The sun rise almost directly behind my back porch, so our new plan was to have a rain in the summer sunrise look and feel. The sun decided to stay behind the clouds. I added a full CTO gel to the backlight to give that warmth the sun wasn’t providing and underexposed those great clouds by a bit to give the full drama. Our last bit to the equation was a medium softbox from up and left to illuminate our couple.
We will be continuing our water theme this Spring with a few more entries in our Soaked category and a couple great underwater session that I can’t talk about just yet. For now, enjoy the passion and chemistry of Haide and Manny.
We love clients who are open to new ideas and creative suggestions. Hannah is our senior portrait client from Seguin High School that we are also using as our fusion project lab rat. We photographed Hannah as we normally would, with cinematic style and lighting. For this session though we also had our video camera and audio mics rolling to create a short interview and footage of Hannah interacting throughout our session. For a location, we started at the home Hannah grew up in McQueeny, Texas and stayed in the area taking advantage of a few old factories with lots of textures and grunge. We are excited to share with you our first Senior Portrait Fusion Session and look forward to offering more in terms of blending audio, video and photographs.
Here is the interview/fusion video. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel for all of our video updates.
And a few more from our Session
Thanks again to my super assistant Austin for running double duty of running lights for me and filming the audio and video for the project.
Thanks to Hannah for being up for something cool!
–JB
We specialize in on-location portraiture utilizing natural and additional lighting. Our talents often place us at weddings, in front of high school seniors, with families as they gather, and endurance sporting events.