Hero Pics

I was contacted by the Band Directors of the San Marcos High School to photograph several students for promotional pieces as they work on student recruitment at the lower grades.  They suggested the session take place during band practice (after school).  I did some research on Google looking at what others were doing with instruments, etc.  They were the typical poses:  mouth piece to the mouth, in a marching mode.

I suggested to the directors that we do something different and maybe with the modern, "grunge" look.  They loved the idea.  So last night, my neighbor Kkai and I set up using the bleachers and the spotters box with the school logo as a background.  Our window of time was between 4:30 and 5:30... the problem is the sun goes down quickly and it becomes dark around the stadium, even with the overhead sodium vapor lights.  

I used a ringlight and two rim lights with a Octobox as a large fill for the lighting.  I also put a flash down the way focused up on the spotter's box.  The light grazed the bleachers which gave it a nice look.

Kkai took some setup photos of me working the session:

You can see from his photo that the fog is moving in and it is really dark.

Because the background went dark pretty quickly, I decided to lay in a sky which I have in my "skies folder".  To make the images uniform,  I constructed a base background from several of the photos and then laid in each of the band students.

After the session, the band performed a concert for the school officials and band parents as the final for marching season.