Todays Shoot - Phil Labonte

My good friend Phil recently got way into guns and shooting. He even is part owner of a gun store, i believe?

While he was home for a bit, he wanted to hit the studio to get some photos of himself with his gun, which is a H&K UMP .45 - before even going onto the shoot I should mention that anytime the gun was pointed at the lens - he took out the mag for an empty and checked the chamber - he is VERY strict and safe with his equipment, which is why i feel comfortable photographing guns, and even shooting guns under his supervision - dude still has the discipline from his days as a marine haha.

As always, anytime Phil is like "lets shoot!" im always down, because its generally not something ive shot before, and i get to experiment a bit... one of my first ever HDR images was with him and his (at the time) new car. my first firework photos (and canon, and shooting a machine gun etc) all him! SO! when he said - lets take some photos of me with a gun, I was down, its something I havent shot before, right? RIGHT!

SO! I wanted to just roll with two very dramatically different lighting set ups

the first was a boomed small beauty dish on a profoto compact 300 - raised up about 10 feet in the air pointing striaght down for directional lighting and a more dramatic lighting effect.

I had the light at 1/4th power shooting at F13 with the 70-200 lens. - The dish would scrim light across the gun giving its details more depth - as you always get more depth/shadows&highlights with directional lighting rather than flat, straight forward lighting.






































































































for the second set I wanted to blast the room with light - I unboomed the dish and had it behind me just around head level - then two bare parabolics turned to 50% - and shot at F11 - this would give two slight highlights on the side while giving a solid midtone in the front - and shooting F11 - when doing the shots of the gun looking for slight depth of field, i could knock the focus a bit rather than having it be 100% sharp, which is what I wanted in the "shooting" shots.


































































































































































It was awesome getting to see Phil for a bit before he disappeared again on the road for what? three months? something like that. and it was cool to shoot a gun instead of a guitar or amp rig. Variety is what its all about in any job you do. next up i think guns and ammo needs to hire me... right?