Av Chad Andrew Thompson
This shot was a lot of fun, but also rather challenging…mostly because I was in it with the rest of the guys.
When I do band shots like this (and I’m not in them) it is so much easier because I can pay closer attention to what is going on in the frame.
We were not quite sure just what we wanted our updated promo cover to look like, but we did know that it was cold outside and the locations were rather poor around our jam spot.
I remembered that we had a pool table on the far side of the room and wanted to do some work with that.
I placed my Nikon SB-700 on a light stand camera left and angled it down towards each of us. You can see the light coming into the top left of the image where the smoke is gathering (an accident on the smoke, but a great accident at that!).
The flash was set to Manual so I could have full control in camera. I lowered the power of the flash so I would not get too many extreme highlights or backsplash in the ugly background (an open walk in closet and a bunch of junk).
I also placed another flash just behind the billiard balls shooting upwards at our faces to get a nice little fill. That flash was set to about 1/8 power.
My camera settings were: f16 to knock out as much ambient as I could, ISO 200, and a shutter speed of around 1/200th.
For post editing I just did some selective sharpening and some dodging/burning to make the image pop. I threw on a little blue color tones to give a cool cinematic feel and just masked out around our skins to keep some neutral tones within the image.
To see this image and more, please visit www.chadandrewthompson.com