Westmont Brass Men Calendar :: Behind the Scenes (1/4)

The past two years I've had the pleasure of heading up a project that started somewhat as a joke but quickly transformed into a fun and exciting fundraiser for the Westmont Music Department. Two years back, our orchestra was raising funds for a tour to China, as transporting a bunch of musicians across the Pacific isn't particularly cheap (we got slightly better rates by sending the violists via FedEx). Somewhere along the line, several anonymous individuals (although I'm pretty sure Emily McClean and Trinity Schwartz were behind it) voiced the idea to make a calendar featuring the men of the brass section as a fundraiser.

Thus was born the Westmont Brass Men Calendar.



These are the covers for our two calendars; in this blog post (and in three others), I'll show you the lighting setups for each shot. This is where I start to transition into some photography-speak, so if you get bored, feel free to just look at the pictures. We'll start off with the best month of the year (though I might be a little biased).

January - Men of the Tuba Section
Evan Ewert, Dallas Thueringer, Wes Taimuty



First off, I'd like to extend a big thank you to the Montecito Country Club for their generosity in allowing us to shoot on their grounds; we couldn't have asked for a better location (unless of course we drove 4 hours to Pebble Beach and got passed the biometric scanners and army of armed guards located right before the first tee). We got to the course early in the morning, while the grass was still dense with dew (there's the obligatory imagery and alliteration). The golf course management let us set up on the back 9, which gave us a little more time to do our work before the early morning golfers came in from the first half of the course.



The setup here was pretty simple; we mounted three Nikon SB-600 speedlights to a boom stand and did our best to aim each strobe at a different tuba players (tubist?). Matt Bennett proved invaluable in helping adjust the lights on the fly, as we were working against the clock (and against the putt, so to speak) as the early birds approached. We wrapped up our shoot and finished packing up just as two fellows started playing the hole before ours...they were probably wearing plaid, or cardigans, or both. Speaking of golf clothing, thank you to Matt, Tyler, and Keaton for loaning us your/your dad's golf shoes :) Matt, thank you for being our resident golf expert and providing clubs, polos, and vests.

February - Brandon Driver
Trumpet



When we were brainstorming ideas for each month's picture, we knew we wanted to draw on Valentine's Day themes for the month of February. And who better to fit the bill than our suave friend, Brandon Driver? Once again, we were working with a very limited time frame for this shoot, so Brad and Jeremy helped greatly with meeting our deadline (we had a concert to make it to that night). Of all our shoots, this was our quickest; I think we shot under 50 frames, including the throw-away setup shots.



We mainly shot two angles for Brandon's picture, and because we were rushing through the shoot so quickly, we forgot to take a shot of the second angle (as you can see by comparing the picture showing our lighting scheme and the final image, the locations aren't exactly the same; however, they were probably only 40 feet apart at the most, and you can actually see the pole that Brandon was leaning against in the background of the setup shot). Also, the lighting for the two angles was identical: Jeremy served as the key light, Brad as the rim. What I really loved about this particular shot was that the car in the background threw a nice warm rim onto the camera right side of the subject, and gave that cool wash of light on the right side of the frame as well.

March - Jeremy Kubiak
Trombone



Since Jeremy was so gracious as to wear a dinosaur costume for the sake of our October 2012 picture, we thought we'd pay him back with a construction shoot. In contrast to our February shoot, March had the most frames out of any of our months (we took about 150). The reason for our extra frames was that we shot at two locations outside a closed-off construction site before stumbling upon this site, which was completely open: no fences, no personnel, no regrets, YOLO. Sorry, that just felt fitting there.



The lighting setup here was pretty similar to that of the golf shot; three bare speedlights served as a key, held patiently by Dallas, with the sun coming in from the back right as a rim. Because we weren't using any lights for fill, it lends for a harsher transition from lights to darks back to lights on the face. In hindsight, I would've probably thrown up a light for fill in both this shot and the golf course picture. However, the difficulty there is producing enough light to give any fill, since we were shooting with little speedlights in broad daylight and at longer focal lengths (meaning the strobe would have had to be farther from the subject as well, unless we would have planned to mask that out in Photoshop, which I didn't want to spend the time doing). Now that I'm working more with studio flash heads, which are many times stronger than speedlights, I think my approach would have been a little bit different. Many thanks to Dal Pal for his patience as he held up all three speed lights for well over an hour. Also, many thanks to Mitch for letting us use his Timberlands, and Victor of the Westmont carpentry shop for the tool belt and tools.

Well, that just about does it for January, February, and March. Stay tuned for a post with the BTS of the next three months, which should be coming up sometime in August!