Ad shoot (part 1)

The project was simple enough: shoot a big bag being used in construction/ renovation projects for the company's new website. I bet if the bag had a plastic lining, you could turn it into a pool.

But even "simple" projects can take a lot of work to produce. More details after the jump.

The client was providing the unfinished basement and we estimated a full-day of shooting on paper, and we learned what they really meant by a "little" and "messy."  Most of the shoot consisted of cleaning and moving things around.  Maybe it was the fashion photographer Richard Avedon who said, "90% of photography is moving furniture," or something to that effect.

Dozen of boxes lined up against the walls and bare studs, covered with dust and bug carcasses who didn't quite make it past the windows. Even with a broom, it took three or four passes to reach the raw concrete but a leaf blower came in handy. Despite the art direction to "leave some dust" on the floor, it was still too dusty and the random twigs and pieces of grass seemingly floating on the corners (thanks to the spiderwebs) didn't quite help with the stylized realism. A while later, the "set" was just about ready. The composition called for the right side to be dark and neutral in order to place a semi-transparent bar holding the copy.

The sample bag we received was larger than expected and full of wrinkles that would not flatten. As for the props, we picked easily recognizable objects to give a sense of scale in relation to the bag.  A luggage and a lamp can be narrowed down but they still come in all sorts of sizes, so a bicycle was added because it tends to be more constant in size.

Shooting with natural light coming from the windows and the tungstens from the ceiling created an unpleasant mix of colors. The window light is casting a bluish color and the tungsten is giving off an orange glow. They could balance each other off in theory, but that's a whole different game. In practice, if I calibrated the camera's white balance for the tungsten lights, I'd add orange gels to the window to match; and if balanced for the outside, I'd blue-gel every tungsten bulb. Typically it's the latter, but whatever is not visible to the camera gets the gel treatment. Also, the light intensity varied too much with the objects being underexposed and the highlights being completely blown out.

At this point I roughly know how I want to light the scene with the main face of the bag receiving the key light, side-face is one stop under, and the right side of the frame is flagged. Ideally, I would put a small gridded softbox on the objects, but because of space, I'll have to use a pair of Canon 580s flash on the left wall, hidden behind the studs.

Here's the final result as delivered. The bag was still super wrinkled, despite efforts of steaming and ironing. Because of the size and plastic material, there was not much we could do to flatten the surface. With the client approval on set, I shot as-is and tried to fix it in post as much as possible. Their graphic designer would later add the company's logo on the bag.

In the end, I used a large softbox on the right, medium box on the left, a pair of 580s against the wall (and behind the studs) to the left, a small box to the right (outside frame) to light the bag, and a 580 in the back to simulate window light. So 6 lights total. Given a full-day to work  and some surprises, this is pretty good. I took a few different angles and closeups just in case.

I thought I was going to break down this post in two parts more evenly, but that's it. In the next post, I'll upload a video of all the outtakes stringed together so you can see the process.