Creepy Dolls shoot - Image rich

[Manfred M]

I was at another shoot this evening. The theme was "creepy dolls", who were a couple of local models, Ashley and Carmen. The concept was Carmen's idea who came up with it at Halloween a couple of years ago.

There were 8 photographers at the shoot, which took place at a small urban playground.


1. Ashley





2. Carmen





3. The site of the shoot with a few light stands. I ended up using natural light, a 47" octabox, a beauty dish, bare bulb flash and a shoot through umbrella as light modifiers. We started shooting at around 7:00 PM and finished around 9:30 PM with sunset at about 8:45.




4. Carmen and Ashley





5. Carmen in the last of the sunlight





6. Carmen. Ashley & Pinnochio





7. Ashley closeup

[Dave A]

These themed shoots seem like a lot of fun while allowing you to practice your craft. I'm interested to see what's next.

Dave

[Rob Ekins]

BGs are a bit too bright for me Manfred and a bit wide.

Shot #2 you can clearly see a car parked across the road and there are a couple of lines running through/into your models head.

I think you nailed the eyes and catch lights in Ashley's shot though.

My interpretation of an Ashley "Spooky" shot.

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[Manfred M]

BGs are a bit too bright for me Manfred and a bit wide.

Shot #2 you can clearly see a car parked across the road and there are a couple of lines running through/into your models head.

I think you nailed the eyes and catch lights in Ashley's shot though.

My interpretation of an Ashley "Spooky" shot.

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Thanks for the comments Rob. This was a group shoot with 8 photographers with two models so there was an aspect of not being able to get too close because of the light stands that were crowding the scene and not being able to get in close enough because most of the photographers were shooting shorter lenses and would get in front of anyone shooting longer focal lengths. I do have a number of closeup shots that I have not processed yet.

I am new to the genre, but find I am starting to get at least a level of comfort in doing the shoots. Part of the reason I was using flash through much of the series was that I was trying to have a fairly underexposed background to darken it and hide much of the busy background material. Most of my shots with studio lights was in a more traditional studio like setting, so things sticking out of heads was quite easy to avoid. Learning a new genre is going to take some time yet.

[Manfred M]

These themed shoots seem like a lot of fun while allowing you to practice your craft. I'm interested to see what's next.

Dave

You are right Dave; definitely fun and a great learning experience for me. Most of my studio light work has been doing in an indoor, controlled environment with a single shooter (me), so the outdoor studio light shooting is definitely a bit different.

I will be hosting a first time overseas visitor to Canada (my son-in-law) for the next few weeks, so I won't be doing these types of shoots until the end of this month. My next role playing shoot is in early August and is titled "War on Gotham", a so super heroes and super villain in an indoor industrial setting. I expect there will be some shoots at the end of this month and in July, but there is no information on these yet.

[Shadowman]

Nice opportunity and captures.

[Manfred M]

A few more posts from yesterday's shoot.

[Dave Humphries]

I ended up using natural light, a 47" octabox, a beauty dish, bare bulb flash and a shoot through umbrella as light modifiers.

To my mind, this particular genre requires hard light sources due to the subject matter - unless the aim is to demonstrate MUA skills.

However, it's easy to suggest this after the fact, thinking of it before is something I would have undoubtedly overlooked and even if I had thought of it and done the entire shoot with contrasty light and dark shadows, I'd have no doubt also wished I had taken some with softer light.


Most (of 1-7) are just too well lit to be 'scary' - in a horror genre, it's what you can't see that is where the fear stems from - not sure I'm explaining this very well, nor acknowledging that such images if shot and processed for the full effect, might be a bit too 'strong' for CiC.


Looking forward to seeing the second batch, not currently visible in your post #7.

[Manfred M]

Thanks for the comment Dave. Let me throw out some information on how I tried to shoot and the limitations of the shooting conditions. My going in goal was to use off-camera light, fairly close to the model. That way I could use light the models correctly and rely on rapid light drop off from the flash to give me a darker background.

The shoot went from roughly 2 hours before sunset (8:45 PM) to the end of blue hour (about 9:20 PM). The setting was a small urban park (fairly close to the downtown area), so we were surrounded by medium height buildings that let some direct sunlight in, especially at the beginning of the shoot. The sky was partially overcast and moderate winds that died down as the sun got lower. There were 6 shooters and two models.

My starting point was to go in with a fairly large portable flash (a Godox Witstro 360) and overpower the daylight so that the effect was that the subject was properly lit, but the background quickly faded back. To put that into context; Speedlights tend to be in the 50 - 70 W-s power range, so my light source, at 360 W-s, was 5 to 6 times more powerful than a small flash. At the beginning of the shoot, I was running the unit at full power and as the light dropped (shooting ended around the end of Blue Hour), was down to around 1/4 power.

From a light modifier standpoint, I tried a 4 ft softbox, that was reasonably close to the subject (about 7 - 8 ft away) for softer wrap around light. The wind blew that over once and was marginally more stable after I added a second sandbag.

I also tried harder light including bare bulb light (the Witstro 360 is a bare bulb flash), a small silver beauty dish (seen in # 3; it's the light stand with the sandbag on it) and a shoot through umbrella. So my lighting varied from soft and wrap around to very hard light; with some very hard shadows in some of the shots. I also tried some existing light shots; both #5 (and also #3). With #5, I tried to use the shadow lines cast by the fence to add some impact. All the shots with flash were done at ISO 100, but I used higher ISO for existing light work.

Part of the lighting issue was that both model's costumes had considerable white components; Ashley wore a white dress and Carmen a white top, so I had to be quite careful in my lighting to not blow out the whites with the flash, and in fact I had to bring down the highlights in post-production to ensure that I got good texture in the white clothing. Just as an aside, we had no input or in fact any idea as to how the models would dress before they showed up. Dark clothing would have given a totally different mood to the shots.

There were challenges of having six shooters on site and shooting at the same time. Four of us were using off-camera flash, and that caused some limitations as we had to try to balance off flash to subject distance as well as shooting distances / focal lengths. I tend to have my lights in close and barely out of frame (that gives a very rapid light dropoff) and tend to shoot longer focal lengths than the others (that tends to give me flatter perspective), but had to compromise here... Group shoots do have this disadvantage.

From a technical standpoint, I got the exposures of the subjects that I wanted. I didn't quite get the look I wanted. I feel that this is mostly related to the model's costume choices, but to a some extent the light modifiers I was using. I think a strip box with a grid might have been a good compromise light source as it would have covered the single model and given me a more constrained light.

Thoughts Dave?

[Dave Humphries]

From a technical standpoint, I got the exposures of the subjects that I wanted. I didn't quite get the look I wanted. I feel that this is mostly related to the model's costume choices, but to a some extent the light modifiers I was using. I think a strip box with a grid might have been a good compromise light source as it would have covered the single model and given me a more constrained light.

Thoughts Dave?

I find the basic exposure is the easy part too.

It's getting the light and shadows to fall in the 'right' places, with the 'appropriate' quality and hardness (and they're two different things) and getting the rest of the ratios 'correct' that is the tricky bit


The costumes do play a big role in my perception, for example if doing it for serious scares, we might envisage fake blood to offset the clean white, but that's probably something that would attract far too much attention in such a public area

Also then the resulting photos become a bit too graphic for CiC, as I touched upon above.

Or perhaps I'm over thinking it and have seen more horror flicks than creepy dolls

[rpcrowe]

I have had the opportunity to shoot at one of these events but declined. I think that the next time I have the chance, I will accept.