Seeing as how I’ve done away with most of my social media, I’ll be posting my recent photo shoots here, talking a bit about what I used, how I did it. Yadda yadda yadda. I’ll be putting the final products here and even posting some video lessons on my photo editing workflow. With all that out of the way, I’d like to bring you into the recent photo and metal belly dance video session I did with Gina Kaos. We filmed a belly dance video to the song “For You” by the band My Dying Bride and when we were done with that we walked around the Rural Life Museum area to snap some scenic pics. Here are the images, video, tutorial, and behind-the-scenes stuff. Going forward, stuff like this will be exclusive content to this site and you won’t be able to see it on YouTube (or search for it on YouTube).
Gina got an offer to be a part of the “My Dark Valentine” online virtual belly dance show, featuring renowned belly dancers worldwide put on by Nazirah Cordova (the Dark Raven Dancer) as part of the Stygian Collective.
The concept of the video as it relates to the song was about a ghostly bride mourning the loss of her husband. She wanted to film inside an old church and I immediately thought of LSU’s Rural Life Museum in Baton Rouge, LA. This place has a ton of cool-looking, old structures that you can do photo shoots in. There’s a charge for this, of course, and as a photographer I’ve been there many times both as the main shooter and as an assistant. It’s quite lovely but I wasn’t sure if they would be into us filming the metal belly dance there, in the church, with a somewhat loud bluetooth speaker.
So, the idea was to get there on a slow day when school groups probably wouldn’t be there, set up in the church, film a few takes, and get the hell out before anyone had time to ask any questions.
I’m sure filming video to music there isn’t a problem, in fact, I think that’s how they make a lot of their money–renting the facility for photo shoots. However, it seems like whenever I do something like this I always get people approaching me to ask if I have permission to be there, who I am, what I’m doing, what it’s being used for, blah blah blah.
Anyway, a little information on the Rural Life Museum.
It’s an area dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of materials from the cultures of the 18th and 19th century Louisianians. The LSU Rural Life Museum holds the largest collection of Louisiana vernacular architecture and the most extensive collection of material culture items from the 18th and 19th centuries. The museum includes 32 historic outbuildings that spread over 25 acres and are divided into four sections. There’s also the Windrush Gardens which is also available for photo sessions.
The following photos were all shot with my Nikon D810 and using a Godox AD600pro strobe light. It was a particularly overcast day which means the lighting was fairly even, but I wanted to expose for the sky and light up Gina as well. This is what strobes are great for.
When you shoot outside with a strobe you set your camera to expose for the brightest area, i.e., the sky. Then, you dial in your strobe to fill in the difference in brightness between your subject and the sky.
I always set my strobe 45 degrees to the subject on the same side as the sun. I recently bought a fill light/hair light as well that I’ll soon be using–this would be used on the opposite side to brighten up the shadows. I do, however, like the effect I’m getting by having very dark shadows and well exposed highlights.
The strobe is operated with a remote trigger that is attached to the top of the camera. You can use TTL (through the lens) which helps calculate what the strobe intensity should be set at, but I find this is guess work for the hardware and I typically do a series of test shots for the room or area I’m in to personally dial in the intensity I want.
I always check the histogram to make sure everything is well exposed and nothing is blown out that can’t be recovered later in post.
I usually set my white balance to Auto so I won’t have to remember to set it and change it again. I can always change the white balance later in post but sometimes on sunny days I’ll set it to Kelvin 5500 which is the daylight setting.
Here are the photos and I’ll post the video settings I used after that.
Metal Belly Dance sessions
The metal belly dance video shoots are always a bit trickier because I don’t have the power of the strobe to lighten up a dark room such as the church we were shooting in. For this occasion I brought my three GVM video lights to help out.
Once inside the church, I set two GVM lights to the side to brighten up the darker area, and I set up a single light to help brighten up the area of the shot that was being filled in a tad with natural sunlight.
I actually used three cameras for this shoot. My main camera aimed at the center was my D810 and then I had my Ricoh GRiii to the “stage right” and my cellphone at “stage left.” I knew I was going to get vastly different looking footage but I wanted different angles and would treat the additional footage as if someone was looking at scenes taken from a CSTV feed, a pro camera, and something like a bystander cellphone capture.
Video certainly isn’t my strong suit and I have little interest in it, but I’m still learning. In the following video I achieved the first shot but lowering one of the tripod legs, putting the two remaining tripod legs at the front of me, focusing on Gina at the podium, then I leaned the camera all the way back till it was facing the ceiling. I then pushed the camera forward till it was back in focusing range of Gina again. It was a cool effect but in hindsight I should’ve put down some sandbags on the tripod feet so they wouldn’t move slightly as I pushed the camera back to its original location.
Alright, so here’s the video featuring the song “For You” by My Dying Bride.
Enjoy.
Now let’s get into my photo editing workflow. This is all exclusive content for this website, by the way.
This video will walk you through my editing workflow for one specific image. I don’t go into great detail here because the video would be too long. I just mention what I’m doing from step to step, what I do first, second, etc. There’s some useful tips and tricks along the way.
