Monday, January 12, 2009

Magazine cover shoot at -30C




Out this week is a feature article on Gordon Kirkwood the CEO of Entegra Credit Union, in Enterprise magazine, published out of BC.

We shot the feature back in mid December when the first real cold snap came into town.
the art director talked about getting a portrait of Mr Kirkwood outside, at Portage & Main. While Portage & Main might well be the second most famous street corner in all of Canada (Bay & Bloor, as financial centre would be first place) it's too wide, boxed in by those barriers and is generally uninspiring to photograph. (I'll save my thoughts on P&M for another rant.) Not to mention at the time we discussed shooting this, it was -42C with a windchill warning. He wanted Mr Kirkwood to wear "One of those really big parkas".Fortunately I have a Canada Goose parka and it was decided to put him in this parka.

The day of the shoot it actually warmed up a bit to a reasonable -27C, but there again with the wind, it felt like -32C. I wanted to use studio style lighting to overpower the existing sunshine. For readers not from Winnipeg, most parking lots traditionally have electrical outlets to allow staff to plug in block heaters so their cars will start. Over the years this has been a great way to power lights since even in summer you could find an outlet in parking lots. Entegra was no exception, with a row of plugs lining their lot. The difference in these days of conservation is there are new ways of regulating and saving the power. While it appeared we had power and set up all the studio lights, the system controlling these parking lot plugs wouldn't allow a quick draw of amperage. The models lamps would come on but not the flashes.

Faced with no other way of lighting I resorted to using Nikon Speedlights and the CLS system. The low afternoon sun was shining right at me so I need a couple speedlights to over power the ambient. The extreme cold played havoc with recharge times, and at times exposure. We were at a loss as to why things were working fine one moment and not, the other.

Working with gear in the cold over the years, I know that being warm is key to being creative. I couldn't have done anything with David assisting me and acting as the VAL(voice activated lightstand)

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