This shoot aimed to capture that feeling. I know a man, known simply as 'The Delivery Man'. You call on this guy when you have something important to deliver, and deliver it he will. Interestingly enough, he also has a Flying Bassett. A wilful yet incredible sweet dog, who is mostly a pain in the hole during the shoot.
We started the day doing a few cross lighting with the delivery man against a clear blue sky.
As before, the thing to do here is expose for ambient until the sky looks acceptably blue and the clouds not over exposed. The limitation with a lot of camera and with the sony a900 is that the max sync speed is 1/250th of a second. So you have to decrease aperature size instead to control ambient light. This however also limits the amount of light hitting your sensor from your camera flash. Even at full power, I had to use two camera flash at 6 feet, firing bare to fill the shadows.
Ok ok, the backdrop were composites of clouds from that day. I couldn't find a high enough place to clear the horizon. So I had to try and get rid of the trees and other what have you's from the image in photoshop. I was really upset!
The image below was tough enough to shoot. I mean this fella could really jump. How do you frame a 6 feet tall fella who can jump 20 feet in the air. On top of it all, you're shooting at 1/250th of a second, potential this will still cause blurring. I find if you wait for the fella to reach the apex of his jump ( ie where he is almost at a stand still for a fraction of a second), the image will be the sharpest.
Now the flying Basset on the other hand has a short attention span. One thing I've learn from this shoot is unless your dog understands at least 2 commands, sit and stay, you have no hope of getting any proper shooting done for the day. For a dog with short attention span, you need a trainer or somebody who has control over the dog to stop the mutt from running around chasing other bitches or kids. Above all, you need to bring doggy treats to hold its attention and a towel to clean off the damn slobber. Failing that, you do a composite and I'm not admiting to that again.
In this instance, the dog got bored and flew away. That was the end of the shoot for the day.
The lighting setup was the same for all the shots. Lovely bare flash cross litted with the sun to camera right.
A big thank you to the Delivery Man. He models in his spare time and you can find his info on model mayhem. http://www.modelmayhem.com/570210
