This time it’s another trip to 1st Class Pole in Melton, Leicestershire, to shoot the students of the dauntless trickster Donna Gant.
After running the dark setup on a previous shoot, I was asked to shoot it at Donna’s in the autumn, but as with many old industrial units there were beams. Lots of beams. While it’s not much of an issue on white backdrop shoots (Thanks to my big bag o’cloth to wrap the beams in white with) for dark backdrops that contain texture and a subtle spotlight, it’s impossible.
You could photoshop the beams out of every image but the time this would take would make the shots financially impractical for the performers, so we needed to come up with a better solution.
This arrived in the form of Donna’s partner Sam engineering a custom brace and bracket set that allows us to mount a pole nice and high in a beam-free zone, giving me both the height I need to get unobstructed shots and buying me loads more width to work with when it comes to positioning lights. Win-win all round.
With the mounting assembly shock-load tested by Sam we were ready to get set up and start shooting, loads of space to work, pristine black paper and a horde of amazing performers made this a really great shoot!
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