Night & Day - Memphis

I've been a little behind on the blog posts, it's been an incredible season for the studio, with so many weddings, commercial shoots & studio sessions, we've just been covered up with work. I'll catch up on the posts soon but I wanted to post this blog first so you can seen what we've been up to. One of my favorite shoots is featured in this post, we shot this behind the scenes video back in March, and held it for the release of the new issue of Southern Bride. Typically when you think of Southern Bride, you think of a posh, elegant, luxurious publication that tens of thousands of brides turn to for inspiration. For this shoot the bar was set high once again, with a little twist- the editors wanted a bit of an edge for this shoot. We teamed up with photographer Joe DeSciose whose images have been seen in Time Magazine and Southern Living, and set out on a 2 day location shoot in downtown Memphis. Joe coined the phrase Night & Day because of the drastic differences in the locations that the editors chose for the shoot. From soft, artistic pretty images, to edgy, elegant high fashion styles, we shot just about every style you can imagine for a magazine feature. For the video, Tracy Leigh helped me shoot both stills and video footage, and we created a quick pace feature reel that keeps you wanting more. For the details on the lighting setups, I'll give you a rundown: We used an Alien Bees ring light with a 60" moon light. We shot with backlighting from the sky whenever we could. We looked for a lot of natural light when possible, using the moon light for a little more commercial edge. There were a few scenes that offered some amazing available light, so I simply shot in full sun or shaded ambient areas that had some killer bounce light coming off of the buildings surrounding the set. It was almost like we had a hollywood lighting crew on location from the feel of the natural light. I've shot on sets with 4-2k fresnels and 20 foot scrims, and 4 foot mirror panels that created the style that we had on this shoot. It makes a photographers day to be able to shoot in this kind of light. For the indoor scenes using sunlight, I brought in reflectors and simply bounced some available light into the areas that needed a little punch. For the underground scenes, I chose a simple 1k fresnel as the key light, and went with heavy shadows for a more dramatic look, occasionally using some canon 580EX flash units with color gels triggered by Pocket Wizards to give us some beautiful rich colors in the background and just barely rimming the models from behind.