Shooting The Emersons

Last week I'd arranged to shoot at Allied Press, the home of the Otago Daily Times in the morning, and shoot over to Emerson's Brewery for a team portrait in the afternoon. I should have known I'd find too much to have fun with at Allied to squeeze into a morning, so I needed to pull off the Emerson's picture as quickly as possible and get back for the 3.00 press run. Luckily, I already had a plan in mind, and was fairly confident that I could pull it off quickly. Richard Emerson has a boutique brewery that is really putting the big Beer Barons on notice about quality and passion in brewing. Since I'm running with a "Tartan Mafia" theme for my business history, shooting Richard and team as this upstart crew seemed like a fun idea. Of course, there were challenges to overcome, so I thought I'd do a little anatomy of the shoot to let you see the process. Challenge number one: The environment.

  >

Grey. Typical industrial setting: lots of fluoro light mixed with diffuse skylight, concrete and stainless steel. I had 20 minutes to make it mine before the staff would assemble. My first job was to add a little colour to the environment. Blue gel on flash, attached out of sight to a keg in the right background via an nasty clamp to colour those brew tanks. I was a little worried that all I'd get was a small specular reflection of my flash. That would have meant to get the whole tank blue, I'd need it to reflect a big blue reflector or diffuser, but the tanks were burnished stainless steel, and not only gave a nice diffuse reflection of the blue flash, they bounced it around each other.

  

Well, they started to, but I was confident that once I had my exposures between ambient and flashes balanced, things would work out the way I wanted. Another blue flash to cover the background from the left, and while Richard pulled a prop into place, I set my key light for him nice and high.

 

I wanted hard, high key lighting with no modifier to get a film noir-ish look, but without time and booms, knew that I'd have to settle for light that wasn't really as high as I wanted. Still, as I put some CTO gel on Richard's key, and another light up with one to light the rest of the assembling team, I was getting into the zone. Here's the lighting diagram if it means anything to you. With my sketching skills, I've got to say, it means little enough to me.

Nearly there. My 20 minutes of prep was up. Shooting in the middle of even a quiet work day, you just can't waste people's time, so I explained my mafia crew concept and started arranging the team quickly.

 

My instructions were simple. No smiles please, look directly into the lens, and hang tough. I arranged some groups, made sure I didn't have a straight horizon of heads and told everyone that straight arms would make them look like zombies, not mobsters. I guess I've been doing this long enough that I had my lighting ratios pretty good right from the start - good enough for a quick setup anyway. So I shot some frames and bada-bing:

 

I was happy, but it always pays to listen to your client. They know the business more than you do. Richard knew that the brewery is constantly being rinsed with hot water and is actually quite a steamy environment, so he wanted some steam. I had my doubts about how manageable that was going to be, but it was a good idea, and he assured me it would be quick to arrange. Minutes later, the floor was awash and steam was rising. Just not the way we wanted it. As you can see, it raised a smile or two.



Not a problem. I liked my clean shot, and knew a little digital steam would be a lot easier to work with later on. If this were one of those big Beer Baron budgets, this wouldn't have taken the hour it did. I'd put a couple of days into the shot. I'd probably shoot the background separately to get the lighting even better, and take everybody into a studio or at least in front of a clean backdrop and shoot them all separately, immaculately lit noir fashion with higher light, some hair lights and kickers. Then would come some heavy post to assemble a kickass composite But Richard Emerson and his crew aren't Beer Barons. Not yet anyway. Small is good for now, and for me, so is fast. Getting what I did in short order, I was pretty happy. Almost as happy as a couple of pints of Emerson's Bookbinder Bitter can make me.  

But there was no time to rest on my laurels. Back at the Otago Daily Times, the stories were written, the plates assembled and the presses were warming up...