We had this fun shoot in a stairwell back in March. I was going back through the images, I realized I had shot a “how I did it series”.

I had no idea where the shoot was going to happen when I showed up. I had two flashes, pocket wizards, and some light stands. They wanted to start in the stairwell, and move to the rooftop. I had a few minutes to play before the dancers showed up, so I decided to concentrate on this little section of stairwell, and trying to light them pretty evenly with soft light, and keep the flashes on low enough power they would recycle fast enough to just keep shooting.

Here’s the light at the bottom, bouncing off the big white wall:

And the upper one:

The two lights were dialed down to about 1/4 power, so they were still putting out a lot of light, but I was able to keep going. It worked out pretty well, we got about 70 shots in the stairwell in 8 minutes, then 4 minutes later we were ready to go on the rooftop for another 15 shots in about 10 minutes. The slower shooting rooftop was mainly because of the long exposure needed to capture the sky detail. Here’s a shot at the same shutter speed I was using in the hallway:

And this whole shoot was fast. I was told we had 30 minutes start to finish, and we needed to do both locations. I did scouting & setup in about 5 minutes, and the rest of the shoot took 18 minutes start to finish. By comparison, the Josh Klipp shoot, was 10 minutes of setup, and 35 minutes of shooting in one location that had already been scouted. All in all, this kind of work is really fun, even working so fast.

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