Shooting a Promotional Picture for a Band with the FE20-70G lens.

[pm-r]

I got an assignment last week to shoot a band that needed new photos for marketing and promotion as they had added new members.  The man that hired me told me the location they had selected was in a small dark bar downtown in Knoxville's Market Square.  As I'd never been there before, I scoured the net for photos inside the location so I could pack exactly what I needed for the shoot.  It's is a narrow room with a bar at one end and a fireplace at the other.  The whole room was packed with large booths to sit in as typical of any lounge.  I packed four Westscott FJ400 strobes but I only brought one camera and one lens to this gig.  I knew two things:  1. It's a small narrow space so I'd need some variance in a wide lens.  2.  I knew I'd never get none musicians into that space without stacking them so depth of field was going to be really important to control.  I knew this would not be shot wide open with a fast lens.

As they all came into the bar, one at a time, as the rain outside poured down.  I kept testing the lights and making adjustments to dial things in.  I put up a large 7' shoot through umbrella camera left (power at 5), a 24" beauty dish on the right (power at 4), and one last light on the floor behind them pointing up at the whole background to give good separation (power at 2.3).  What I needed was enough light output to be able to shoot at f/5.6 so the front and rear-most members of the band would be sharp, but I also wanted the background to be soft so as not to distract from the people in the foreground.  

Everyone was looking pretty grim as we started the shoot and so I made them all laugh by cracking a joke at how one person in the band never seemed to smile.  they all laughed at this and the image you see above was the result.

the a7RV was the easy choice of a body to use for this one as I wanted to deliver them a large file as I have no idea how the image will be used in the future.  I typically always use the a7RV for all my portrait work.  I only brought the FE20-70G lens because I knew I needed maximum flexibility and I ended up using the zoom the entire time as I walked backwards and forwards and zoomed in and out to frame things just right.  The final image was shot at 1/15th, f/4, 250 ISO, and the zoom was set to 34mm.  The FE20-70G was perfect for the shot.

Edited August 14, 2023 by pm-r
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