Recently I had the fortune to shoot some material with Tatjana Gellert.
We only had a few hours before she had to head out and catch her train to Germany. I picked the harbour area in Basel as an industrial background for the shoot. (I actually work there often as there are so many corners, cool grafitti walls, train tracks, etc. - you find something new every time…)

While our make up artist Rachel was working on Tatjana, we had a friendly encounter with a local dock worker. He informed us that he could tell we were going to take pictures around there and that he had done so aswell with his girlfriend recently. Appearently he got a $400 fine when the police were walking by, because he and his GF weren’t wearing bright orange vests so that they could be spottet from the moon, or at least by the crane operators near by.  (more after the jump…)

He pleaded that we should really go get some orange vests going… But seeing that nobody was really working around there anymore we figured we’d take the risk. (Plus I wasn’t sure how our Model would have taken it if I had said:”Listen, Tatjana I’m having second thoughts about that cute black dress your wearing there, so let’s try that other, that orange outfit.. you know, I think vests are vastly underrated!”)

Our first setup was at the train tracks in between two… ahm.. trains. I used an Elinchrom Ranger Unit for power. Connected was one head with a beauty dish as my main light, more or less in camera axis.  A second head with a standard reflector was used as a rim light from behind.  Wherever possible I tried to use the sun coming from camera right, slicing through the structure of a nearby crane, as an additional light source, accentuating Tatajanas left side as seen below:

A bit of an issue were the trains themselves. They were right there in deep shadow with the sun setting to our right. In order not blow out the sky, which I just hate doing, I had to drop down my exposure to around f/9.5 with a shutter of 1/180s. Works great for the sky, not so much for the trains. But seeing that I had forgot my other 25 Ranger power packs and strobe heads, plus the 7 assistants who usually help setting them up, I took artistic liberty and decided that the silhoutte train thing in the back was just what I was aiming for…

Here’s a shot of the setup. Fairly straight forward stuff really…

For the second setup a nearby wall with grafitti served as our background. I always like it when the things you find on location can be incorporated to your idea or vice versa. Grafittis or signs can work well towards that end as they bring a second level of information to your image, without being too obvious about it… after all, they were just there. In this case there was giant “M” on the wall. Now don’t ask me what the “M” is supposed to stand for, but I liked it when I saw it and it’ll give the viewer something to think about.

We added a little red to Tatjanas make up to match the color on the wall. As you can see I got another rim light from the left going here. This setup was actually in straight sun light, hitting the wall head on. So I had to cranck up the power on the Ranger and used a standard reflector to throw a good hunk of light on Tatjanas back. On camera right, fairly close to the model I placed a beauty dish to fill in for the harsh shadows the sun was casting.

For the last set of the day we went a little further down the train tracks. I was looking for some perspective along  the buildings and freight containers in the background. The idea behind the shoot was to create a sense of self destructive tendencies. So the bottle of booze was set as a prop element.

The sun was still high enough to make it over the wagons on the right. So I decided to incorporate that, which gave me a nice slash of light on Tatjanas cheek. Again, I filled in with a beauty dish from camera left at fairly high power. This resulted in a sort of cross lighting with the sun. I used the second strobe with the standard reflector on camera axis to fill in her face from the front as well.

 

Long post today! I hope your still having fun though… I am. We’re almost done anyway. I just want to show you one of the first images I had time to go through processing with. First the shot straight out of the box (like all images in this post are) and afterwards the retouched version:

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Posted by nicolas_henri on July 9th, 2008 :: Filed under On Location, Photography
Tags :: Lighting Equipment, Making Of, Tatjana, Train
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