I Heart Stereo Shoot with BTS

John and Brandi are an awesome duo that make up the band i Heart Stereo.  I did a shoot for them last summer and it was time for another shoot for their new website and for other promo purposes.  They are nominated for a Grammy so make sure you tune in and check that out as well.

The shots they wanted were simple, just plain white back ground and black and white.  Simple enough so we headed to the location.  We didnt want to rent out a studio so we just used white dry-wall for the backdrop.  I used two Yongnuo YN-560 flashes for my lighting setup through most of the shoot.

For these I had the strobe on the left at about 9 foot and pointing down to light the face.  I was having issues with shadows so the second strobe was about 4 feet away on the right, it was pointing right at the wall to still offer light on the back of the subject and the wall, without ridiculous shadows.  Also stepping back from the wall helped as well.  The last image above shows the problem with the shadows and the top image shows the results after bouncing the light off the wall.

Here is a picture to show the gist of what the light set up was like.

Just add a simple BW preset to take care of the post processing and a little crop.
















He really liked that arrow, so why not use it right?

 Here is the lighting setup for that shot, pretty simple, just two strobes.  It was just random testing to see what lighting we got and ended up liking it a lot, a nice hard feel to it.

They didn't have this in mind but I thought why not.  I wanted to use all the lights that I had and I saw this done once by David Hobby the Strobist.  

Here is the light setup.  The back two lights really dont serve much purpose other than for looks and maybe a little back light for the background.  I used the Canon 430EXII for the lighting on the face.  Post processing was a bit more than the others.  I used Lightzone to bring out a lot of detail to give it some pop.  Then I placed it in Photoshop to do some dodging and burning as well as some sharpening.