Another shoot at the abandoned incinerator with Alex

This past Sunday, Alex and I returned to the incinerator to continue working on some things we started during our first shoot together (also at the incinerator, covered here).  My friend Joe came along again to help out and do some shooting of his own.  Unlike our last trip to the incinerator, the weather was considerably warmer and the ground was no longer covered in snow, making the hike down far less tiring.

As with last time we met by the High Falls art gallery and then relocated to a closer parking space near the access road.  As we got ready to head down I checked with Alex to see what kinds of outfits she brought and the answer I received was along the lines of “none.”  We had originally planned to do this shoot a week earlier but I wasn’t feeling well and had to call it off; between then and this past Sunday we never really finalized on what we planned to shoot.  She wanted to continue with some things we had been working on the first time we shot at the incinerator and so did I, so it worked out well anyway.

We had a specific location in mind from our previous shoot there which I have been calling the “room of doors.”  We never made it to that room or the building it’s in during our first shoot because we were all too worn out to continue hiking through the snow that was in our way.  After making it down in to the gorge we headed directly for this room and I started working on setting up my lighting gear.  A car door with fairly bright red paint caught our eye (well, Alex’s) and Joe helped by moving it in to location since he was the only one who remembered gloves.  It was about this point that I realized I forgot my tripod thus forcing my decision to stick with flash and Joe realized he couldn’t find his optical slave.  Woops!  Flash made some things easier and others a bit harder; moving a 60″ umbrella on a stand around inside this place is a bit of a trick and I have to thank Joe again for helping out with that!

Moving to flash wasn’t a bad thing, I planned to use it anyway and it gave me a chance to try out the 60″ Photek Softlighter.  The window light coming in to the room was fantastic but not terribly bright due to the rainy weather; fortunately the big umbrella/softbox stood in well as a fake window.  One problem I was faced with was how dark it was in the room and my umbrella blocking the window wasn’t helping matters any.  This led me to the brilliant discovery that the Petzl headlamp I keep in my bag makes an excellent focus light and secures to the top of my camera with the sync cable attached quite nicely!  Building a hard-mounted focus light has been on my to-do list for a while anyway, so I may have to find a few bits of mounting hardware to make a sturdier solution that works regardless of whether something is mounted on my camera’s flash shoe.

I did a lot of shooting in the room of doors with this setup before we realized how much time had passed.  Alex had somewhere to be at 4PM and it was already 2PM… almost 3 hours had passed already since meeting up!  I wanted to get us upstairs to the second floor where it was a bit more open before we finished, so I rushed things a bit to wrap up.  Rushing usually leads to mixed results and indeed some of the things I shot at the end of our time in the room of doors weren’t exactly what I wanted.

As we were packing everything up to move upstairs I assessed the damages done.  Joe noted I had managed to crossthread the 1/4-20 bolt in to my flash; I also noticed that the plastic around one of the shoes on my sync cable had cracked.  This didn’t concern me much since I never mount that part to a shoe (it’s got a metal 1/4-20 hole I use) but that may need to be dealt with if it will lead to the whole shoe falling apart.  The most amusing failure happened upstairs where the thumb-twist on one of my camera batteries broke off as I was trying to lock it in place.  Fortunately everything is under warranty and aside from the flash (which was my own fault) everything else seemed to be the result of bad luck and defective materials.

Upstairs I set up to shoot Alex by a window with an interesting metal hinged grate in front of it with some nice foliage and bricks outside the window.  Once again the flash came in handy since I needed to overpower the ambient light outdoors to avoid a harsh backlighting situation.  I took a couple test shots to get exposures dialed in which also alerted me to the color issues I suspected the different light sources would lead to.  Left uncorrected, the light outside the window threw off the camera’s white balance system and turned everything lit by the flash to a rather unpleasant coolish hue.  I stopped the aperture down and took a white-balance reading directly off the diffuser on the Softlighter and ended up using that for everything I shot during the day.  While that solved most problems I encountered, I still had to deal with the boost to saturation that comes with using curves to bring back the contrast lost in shooting RAW.  Sometimes this results in things that teeter right on the edge of looking a bit off to me, and I often rely on an extra set of eyes to help me out.

I finished up my shoot by the window and then helped Joe out with his setup at the other end of the building which wrapped up the shooting for the day.  After that we packed everything up and headed back on up to our cars… an unpleasant hike when the day before you had been helping friends move.  I can’t say where we’ll be shooting next but I have a feeling we’re done with the incinerator for now!  She and I are working on some ideas for upcoming shoots (which I hope happen soon!) although for one of the ideas I’ve got to find someone to do hair and makeup.

I’m trying a new jQuery based ‘spoiler’ hiding tool.  If you want to see the gallery which I’ve hidden (because of ‘adult’ content) just click where it says “Show Gallery.”