atwork (www.atwork.at) is a small IT company that does consultancy and implementation of cloud strategies, web portals, social media campaigns, other web-oriented stuff and also software development and business solution development. They needed pictures of their employees for their website and got into touch with me due to the shoot I had done of Microsoft people a few weeks ago.

The shoot took place at their office which is inside a shopping center - we used two sliding doors for some basic portraits and then moved to a walkway above the shopping area as well as a hallway in the back. Before the shoot, Carina (www.feengleich-makeup.com) did some light touch-up work on everyone who was willing - this was the first time I had worked with her and I am really happy it worked out so well. Efficiency is the name of the game and she was quick and thorough which meant we could get on with shooting almost immediately after my setup, which was one light as a hairlight and two as key/fill (f/3.2, 1/125s, 50mm, ISO 200).

After the initial portraits, we used the well-lit walkway to do some full body shots - one light set to 1/4 as backlight and one in a softbox at 1/8 as key (f/2.2, 1/200s, 50mm, ISO 100):

Then we went into the corridor and used a single light in a reflective umbrella to produce some more portraits in landscape orientation, you can see the setup as well (f/3.5, 1/200s, 100mm, ISO 400):

Biohazard was playing as part of the Rebellion Tour and I sorted out a short promo shoot with them - unfortunately, due to it being the first gig of the tour, everything was a little crazy and so the actual shoot happened literally 2 minutes before they needed to go on stage. I had been waiting for 45 minutes for it to happen but did not have the chance to really shoot any tests, so in the end I just had to hope I got it right... here it is:

It was shot at f/5.6, 1/160s, ISO 400, 25mm with a blue gelled Speedlite at 1/2 as backlight and two Speedlites at 1/4 as key and fill - here's a setup shot:

And then there was the gig itself of course! Great show as always, absolutely explosive and full of energy!

Archetype Apparel (www.dresslikeasir.com) is back with new stuff for summer! And all of it looks pretty damn fine if you ask me. So we set up an outdoor shoot at Arena and advertised for a bunch of models with the plan of having really summery pictures although it is just mid-April. Anyway, as often happens in April, the weather took a turn for the worse and we had to move the shoot – luckily a location was found… unfortunately it was a cellar. With no light. And no space. But hey, this is where the fun happens, right? “Oh, by the way,” my good friends Tom and Dani say, “we still want the summery look, OK?”

Sure. Let’s do it. We’ll just ignore the fact that the motion-activated cellar light turns off every 10 minutes (not that it was much of a light anyway, just a single bulb). We’ll also ignore the fact that the actual space to work in is about 67 square centimetres. However, on the bright side (pun intended), there were 4 fixed lights there which we were able to use to at least provide a bit of ambient. Here is the setup taken on the phone as I was trying to work my (limited) magic:

So I set up a Speedlite shooting through the umbrella as my main light and then bounced an orange-gelled Speedlite off the ceiling and back wall trying to emulate evening sunlight. Finally I threw in a hairlight at the back, also gelled orange, just to give it a bit more flood.

The pics are actually edited minimally in Lightroom and then I threw a very light fog and glamour glow filter over them in Color Efex. I’m quite happy with the look - and more importantly so are Dani and Tom!

I was specifically told that we were going for more fun than the standard fashion pictures. I am also not really one to do fashion photography so that suited me just fine – especially since I got such positive feedback from the last couple of Archetype Apparel shoots. So here are a couple of the friendlier ones:

Virginia Ernst is a singer / songwriter (check her out at https://www.facebook.com/OfficialVirginiaErnst) who I met while shooting at the Fitfabrik a few weeks back. We got into talking and she asked me whether I would be available for promoshots... guess what my answer was?

So I met up with Virginia to get some shots for her new single "Rockin'" - the song has references to a train and therefore we decided to meet up at a train station to get some shots in on the rails and possibly on the platform. It was a bit overcast so almost ideal for this kind of stuff, and Virginia was happy to walk and jump on the rails - which is what I had initially envisioned as the best place for the CD cover:

I used the trusty 70-200 for this shot and edited it a little bit in Color Efex in order to get the faded look. I tried a different look as well below in order to have it a bit more contrasty and cinematic:

I thought we had some nice stuff here but we also wanted a couple of shots on the platform so we tried that as well - and it turned out to be perfect! There was absolutely nobody there and we were able to use the whole length of the platform. I changed to the 50mm lens though because I wanted to see if I could get good use out of f/2.0:

It was important to get the clock into the shot as there is a reference to 7:30 in the song - the final image had a bit of editing done on the fly by my friend Dani Hofer. I used Color Efex again to get the faded summery look. Anyway the one that made it finally is actually this one which is a little on the soft side but that makes the text stand out perfectly:

Let me know what you think. I'm quite happy with the result.