Todays Shoot - Black Metal Sean

This shoot has been in the works for literally a year or two... We've been talking about a shoot forever, but he was waiting for his new drum kit and for things to be right to do the shoot.

SO! finally the day has arrived.

I hit the road to Meriden, CT to meet up at his practice space, and load in gear.

The ceilings are VERY slow and the massive drum set takes up most of the room, so i knew lighting for this would be a bit tricky.

While he did his corpse paint, I set boomed a dish outside, then brought it in (as the ceilings were too low for me to do that in the space) and used a rim to the back left of the camera to fill in the rest

his kit is insane, soooo epic - i needed more room and more lighting to make it look perfect so I sort of had to improvise and work with what i could.

I basically used the dish to light the top of the kit - as well as Sean, then the rim would fill in the drum heads, the shells, etc.












The highest the boomed dish would go is juuuuust above the cymbals, as you can see in the set up shot above.. so shooting was fairly tricky, had to rearrange a bunch and i was basically on top of the drum set getting the shots. I left the lights where they were and moved around the kit a bunch to get different types of lighting and shots, as it was easier for me to move, than to move the lights - I was shooting at ISO100 at a 160th - and at F18 when sean was near the cymbals - and at F20 when he was sitting. - shot with the 24-70 which is perfect for these shots because I had to cut out environment to make these shots work, but also didnt want to be in too tight where you wouldnt see the kit.

































































After shooting at the space, we were going to go to a public park to shoot some outdoor stuff... upon arriving, the place was overflowing with zero parking and about 50 full families, so we decided to move along to an alternate spot for to not get a crowd.

My first "go-to" outdoor location for a place i dont know is behind a major strip mall or super market because its usually empty - no one will bother you shooting on location there, and its usually got some large walls, singular color, generally loaded with midtones... anyway, it just tends to work well - so we went behind a stop and shop or walmart, i forget which, and started shooting.






































































It was starting to get dark out so i jumped up to ISO200 shot at 2.8 at a 200th - then when he put the helmet on i had to jump to ISO400 as the sun was quickly going.





















































All in all im pretty pumped on these shots, they came out awesome, Sean did a great job being wicked black metal, and we will be shooting again in the near future. One thing to keep in mind when shooting anyone wearing alot of white makeup is that it reflects light and over exposes easily so always try to shoot just one step down when you take the shot so the face isnt completely blown out with whites.