Been doing some interesting shoots lately (Off-season, my ass!). Mostly far removed from weddings and mostly ranking as brand new “firsts” for the house of aStillPicture, which is always nice. Nothing like trying something completely different to keep you on your toes. Shooting big rig trucks, for instance, was definitely a big ol’ FIRST for me. Somewhat different than a couple in love, eh? A good few tons of steel and wheels parked in mid-day sun aint nobody’s friend, take it from me! But I digress — that’s a whole different post all together. A somewhat more pleasant first was this shoot I did for Karma Activewear’s new clothing line. Any ladies out there looking for sportswear — be it for gym, yoga, Pilates or whatever else you’re into — check them out!

The brief was fairly straight forward. Get photos of Karma Activewear for general brochure, website and marketing purposes — basically show the active wear being actively worn. With this in mind we lined up 2 different locations for 2 different looks. Firstly some shots in a Pilates studio. Here we proceeded to put Claudia, our model, through her paces with a series of poses seemingly inspired by a drunken game of twister. It didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that quite possibly neither Pilates nor yoga was in fact for me. TheGirlfriend will attest to the fact that I generally have enough trouble with such arduous tasks as getting up or putting on shoes. I certainly don’t intend to risk life and limb – and almost certain death – trying to balance on a large plastic ball whilst holding my one foot firmly against the back of my head. Such matters are best left to the pros… Pros like Claudia, who quite miraculously escaped injury and disfigurement to walk away entirely unscathed! Hats off! I spent the evening icing my knees, after all the low down shooting on hard Pilates classroom floor — a most unforgiving surface!

For and event and lifestyle photographer, shooting in a big white Pilates exercise room is probably as close to a photography studio as we’re likely to get and for a Strobist lighting geek such as myself, that’s all the excuse I need to pull every piece of lighting equipment I own out of the bag. Generally I don’t get to do too many multi-light setups at weddings because of time constraints. I’m usually running and gunning with one or – at the very most – two off-camera flashes and using the ambient light to augment that… or maybe its other way round? But here I had free reign. A blank canvas. AWESOME! So I ran thru the whole gambit, from bare flash to diffused and bounced flash, from entirely flash lit to ambient balanced and at one stage even ambient only — but then I regained my senses and turned the flashes back on! By this shot right here I was up to no less than 4 flashes, which obviously had me all giddy.

We then set off for a little thicket of trees by the side of a pretty busy road. The idea being to do some more relaxed, less choreographed (read: life threatening) shots. I’d probably be telling a wee fib if I said this was entirely new to me though. Truth be told, shooting portraits at sundown is my bread and butter so I went straight to work doing what a generally do… finding some decent light and working my trigger finger. Thinking about it now, I don’t really have a preference either way — shooting outdoors, working with natural light or shooting in controlled, studio-like environments — I enjoy it all and as long as I don’t have to choose between the different disciplines I’ll be quite happy, I think. What with variety being the spice of life and all that…

In the end I was rather pleased with the results. Have a look!