BTS Look: Commercial Photoshoot
By William Lulow
Note: I published this article a few years ago, and then around August of 2021. It’s important when learning a technique that may be new, to see it in action. Here, I wanted to add more description of the technique involved. You can learn a lot about how a photographer goes about his or her jobs often just by looking at some images shot while the job was in progress. You need to know what you are looking at, however, that’s why explanation is necessary. Also, it’s important to note that different photographers may approach the same job differently. As basically a studio photographer, I am always thinking about lighting and how I am going to depict my subjects.
Here was an interesting assignment that called for a little extra know-how! A few years ago, I was asked to shoot some portraits for a company offering luxury jet plane travel. I had to photograph the executives in and around a couple of private jet aircraft at the Westchester County Airport. I knew I was going to have to use some extra lighting because airplane hangers are rather large and the lighting had to be just right. So, I was prepared to “light up the place” if I had to. These are the kinds of assignments that you just cannot use all available light and come away with some really great images. Yeah, in the old days you could shoot something like this with high speed film and maybe push process it enough to get some good exposures, but when you look at advertising photographers and how they set up for a shot like this, how much equipment is needed and what the results are, you begin to see that it’s not just a matter of getting the exposure right and that’s it! This wasn’t for a major advertisement, but it still required some real good lighting.
Here is what the shoot looked like from behind the scenes:
I have often said that when lighting a large space, you have to make sure that the background is lit separately from the subject. Light tends to fall off very quickly, especially from electronic flash units. You cannot simply show up with a flash on-camera setup. So, you need to have plenty of light on the background. For some of these shots, I had to light the rear of the plane with a single flash head without an umbrella, with the power pack set on full power. (Notice the long extension cord). Also, the second light (fill-in) is not in its final position in this shot. It ended up placed much more to the right of the subjects and down lower.
Here are some more behind the scenes looks:
This is actually one of the outtakes, but one thing I always do when I have assignments like this is to pack plenty of extra extension cords as well as a couple of extra flash heads, because you never know where your nearest power source will be when you are using studio flash lighting or how much power you will actually need to light things up. Here, I needed a couple of extra cords as well as an extra head or two. (You can see them in the shot above). Again, whenever I have a location shoot like this, I always bring more lights and other equipment than I think I will need. You can never have too much lighting.
Again, when you are trying to light a large space you may need to place lights in the background to make sure that the parts of what I like to call “THE SET” receive enough light to make them register in the image.
Here is one of the final images of the CEO of the company:
I knew I wanted to have light on the plane itself, but I wanted to make sure that the CEO received good “portrait light” as well. The flash head used to light up the rear of the plane here was used “raw” (not diffused or bounced) to make sure I got full power from it. I also used a separate 1000watt/second generator and had it on maximum power to ensure that the background was lit.
Many photographers these days, don’t really invest in a lot of lighting equipment and maybe they know how to create an image like this with available light, but I seriously doubt one could reproduce this effect without lights. (I still own several flash packs with probably, seven or eight heads so that I can create some incredible lightings when I need to. I certainly don’t use them for every shoot, but they are there anyway. For many of my “simple” headshots or portraits, I often start with five lights in the studio. Look at some of my prior blog articles for my lighting diagrams).
There are also more and more photographers who rely on MONOLIGHTS, electronic flash units that can run on batteries and don’t need a separate flash generator because it is built in to each head. That does away with needing long extension cords on a shoot like this. Another thing I have seen many pros do is bring two or three assistants with them on a shoot. That way, each assistant can hold a light and you can do away with light stands. The famous photographer Annie Liebovitz does this. She probably has ten-to-twelve people assisting her on many of her shoots. Then again, she is usually shooting for clients who can afford her fees. If you are a sole proprietor and your clients often consist of smaller corporations with limited budgets for photography, it’s hard to shoot the way she does. So you often have to scale the equipment you use to what the shooting budget is.
When you have seen any “behind the scenes” shots of any successful ad campaign or if you have been able to see what goes into a big commercial shoot, you know immediately what needs to be done. Effective images like this one are not just “taken” by any old digital camera set on AUTO. They are carefully conceived, set up and “made” with a lot of thought and knowledge. Very often, really professional types of images are made to look like nothing special was done to achieve their “look.” But, then again, that’s the reason I publish some of these articles.
