I had an opportunity to help Tiana,Andy, and Kevin get started on their portfolios last weekend. It was an amazing shoot! I chose to start at an abandoned stockyard in Marana. We ended up shooting the whole day there, and got LOTS of great images. I have more edits to come, but here are some of the highlights:

For this one, I used a pair of steel grain silos as the background. These particular silos were smooth steel, painted. In the 20 years since this yard has been used, the silos have rusted into a beautiful pattern.

On the property is an airplane hangar style garage. It was a huge, open space, so I closed the doors and used my small strobes to light this image showing off Tiana's curves.

 

 

Tee and Kevin are in the middle of the hangar, and Andy is looking into the hangar. We tried this image both like this, and with Andy and the doorway between Tee and Kevin. It gave more of a love triangle feel, while this one has an unwanted stalker type of feel.... I dropped Andy to black and white to reminisce the psycho feel.

This is just a classic/cliche shot of a couple hitch hiking. He's determined, and she's mad. They are obviously fighting. I used a very long lens to compress the scene and make the road look the way we needed. I didn't want to see sky, and I wanted the relatively long straight stretch of road to appear more as an "S" curve.

 

 

I find this shot very beautiful. It may be my favorite from the day. This was taken inside a small grain silo! Unlike the silo above, this one was made from galvanized, corrugated steel and had wonderfullly patterned texture. You can see parts where the galvanizing has worn off and the walls have rusted. The silo had an access port on the side that we climbed in through, and an opening in the ceiling allowing the open sky to pour in on top of her. We lit her with multiple softboxes and the far wall was lit by setting a flash right up against. Her hand was too dark, so Danaka (my awesome assistant) climbed back out through the hole and used one of the 22" silver reflectors to bounce in some much neeed cool light.

Not much to say about this one, just leave a dancer to her own devices and you're going to get some great stuff!

Another image I really like from this shoot. It is so totally outside my normal range, I have to enjoy it for that alone. We wanted to create an image around the no smoking sign, so we discussed wardrobe and danaka and I went over to set up. Tiana arrives with a totally different outfit, which was fine.. funny, but fine. Turned out she had an issue with the original pants chosen, and the plan unravelled from there. This turned out better than what i had visualized anyway! I had to make some adjustments to the shot, namely throw light on both sides of her jeans so they separated from the black background. Then, the right (our right) side of her face fell into the background, so we light that separately with a Snoot and created this image.

 

 

Another image inside that silo! This one taken with a wide angle from floor level. Yes, I'm laying on the floor and it's covered with chaffe, dirt, and worse.

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