Check out How I did my Front Cover Magazine Photo Shoot

Hi,
As I have told you guys earlier I photographed the cover for World Wide Golf Magazine a while back but could not yet share any images with you. The magazine is finally out so I can now show you guys some more details from the photo shoot.

As I mentioned before I was using Profoto Lights to light up both the background evenly as well as Mr. Donald Trump himself. I took a few over view images so that you can easier see my photography set up for this magazine cover photo shoot.
http://issuu.com/sportingpublications/docs/wwg_june_issue__lr

Here is my lighting set up, I had 3 D1's, I was at first thinking I should use the B1's since I was not sure if I would have near by access to a power socket but I had the chance to go to my location the day before for a quick look at the premisses to give me an idea of what I had available for me so in the end I opted for that D1's would work fine. I had two Profoto Strip Softboxes RFi 1x6' to make sure the background was evenly lit up. You can see part of my Profoto Octa Softbox that I used as my main light that I had positioned just above Donald Trumps head. On this photo it is lower down for when I was testing but you will see below that I put it higher up later due to that Donald Trump is a very tall man he is 1.91cm. ( I googled that in advance, so that I would be prepared of how I would have to position my lighting) When you know you have an extremely short period of time to photograph someone you should aim at having as few surprises as possible and to have as many facts as you can to speed up the photo shoot itself.  I had my back drop stand as high up as I possibly could and it was still not as high up as I would have liked it to be. I wanted more back drop space above his head than I actually had but hey there was nothing I could to about that there. I am quite tall (1.76cm) but I still had to stand a little bit on my tipi toes in order to create more background space above his head as well as not to photograph him from below :)

My assistant refused to step in front of the camera when I wanted to do a test shot lol so here is a shot of me testing how it would look if I gave Donald Trump a putter. You can see that I had put my main light  a little bit higher for this shot than in the previous one when I was just checking if they were all working at the same time :)

Here you can see an issue I had when Mr. Trump pointed the driver too far right, the end interfered with my background lighting, so I had to steer him more to the center to get a good shot. This is due to us being in such a small space, had we had a larger studio then this would have been avoided. But we had set up a studio in a small room next to where the press conference were for the Trump International Golf Course Akoya by Damac. Thankfully it was quite a high ceiling so that was to my advantage.

 To show you how the front cover was set up. My assistant Sherif Karas had put an X mark with tape on the floor so that we could easily tell Mr. Trump to please stand right there where we knew our light was set up for. I then removed it in photoshop on the images where it was visible.

I used a 2,75cm white paper back drop in case you were wondering. The white back drop was set up in front of a window.  With all this studio gear you can imagine my car was filled to the rim. I had to take the baby car seat out to be able to fit my camera bag lol. The camera I used of this job was a Canon 5D Mark 3 with the Canon 24-70mm lens f2.8. For most of the photographs I had my shutter speed on 160 and aperture was 8 and 9. I used 8 for most of the shots but changed in the end to 9 for some but kept my shutter speed the same and ISO was 100. I always photograph with the camera in Manual mode to make sure I have full control of all the elements.
If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask, I will try and answer as best I can.
Over and out for now.
Helen xx
www.shippeyphotography.com