It’s another road trip, two jobs over three days, I don’t want to show any of the jobs (can’t at the moment) but I would to talk about equipment and the logistics of working away from the office/studio (numbers in brackets denote the pictures). One job was an editorial portrait (1) and the other was a food and location-studio/social media commission (2-3), so two sets of equipment in the car (5). The time table for both jobs was – Wednesday morning travel to Morpeth to create images for editorial job at mid day, then travel to Edinburgh to check in hotel and send the job back to an agency in the Midlands, after I’d rendered out the job using Lightroom (10), using a mobile phone as mobile hot-spot (11) to transfer the images over the internet.
Thursday (and Friday) morning an early start, up about 5:30am pack car (don’t leave anything in the car (6) that you can’t live without, being able to work and complete the commission is paramount) drive to location then unpack the car (6-blue handbag isn’t mine BTW), no parking at the location, had to find non permit parking in a residential area. Walk back to location and set up to start, worked from 7am till 11am. Back to the hotel to transfer the images onto a laptop and backup Lightroom catalogue to an external hard drive (must carry this around with me, just in case). Then the afternoon is spent shooting images around Edinburgh (with (1) the editorial camera bag) returning to the hotel room to add to the Lightroom catalogue (10) and back up all over again – some images had to be sent out quickly using the mobile phone method described above for social media posts (11).
Just a quick note on working methods, I’ve been using Godox 360’s for location work for quite a while. They’re light/relatively small and quite powerful (battery life is fantastic), the wireless trigger is a godsend (8). I carry old quad skins in my reflector bag and I use these to go over a beauty dish if I need (8). Also I’ve been using live view a lot and for architecture/products I’m using a Zacuto finder attached to a Nikon D800e for focusing/reviewing images(9), other important/interesting (only to me) things in (9) are Three legged thing right angled bracket and blu-tac on lighting stands very useful.
So here’s the contents of each bag, from (sort of) left to right!:
(1) Editorial kit – Nikon D3, Nikon 70-200mm F2.8 vr1, Nikon SB800, Nikon SB900, Nikon 24-70mm f2.8, Nikon D4 with yellow bumper on. Not in shot TTL triggers for the flash.
(2) Lighting kit – (clockwise from top left) Lighting gels and Godox 360 underneath. another Godox 360 with gels and a hi-speed trigger, 3 power packs-leads-spare double AA batteries-power pack clamps and some grids, Another Godox 360 in an Elinchrome mount, centre some dishes and diffusers, in the case lid, some extra pop up diffusers.
(3) Architectural/product kit – (clockwise from top left) Nikon 35mm PC lens, Samyang 14mm F2.8, Nikon D800e, Nikon 45mm PCE lens, Sekonic flash/light meter, Right angled finder, Nikon 24mmPCE lens, Flash trigger and bubble level, Nikon D800e with 85mmPCE lens, Zacuto finder, Nikon 16-35 vr f4 lens.
(5) (clockwise from bottom left) lighting case (2), computer case with external hard drives, card readers, power bricks and spare cables for computer and phone, clothes bag, editorial kit (1), small beauty dish and Go-Pro kit in shopping bag, underneath (1) food and bottled water, then case (3). Behind all of this are lighting stands and tripod (you can see these in (6,7) along with reflector case).
I hope this had shed some light on what goes into a location shoot and some of my working methods. It’s a bit of a juggling act on what equipment needs to make an appearance, but there’s only so much you can carry/fit in the car and as usual I still take more than I need, but as things can break you still need to have gear to complete the job to the requirements of the brief. Oh and on this one apart from me there were two other people in the team David and Loren that produced the food commission and as usual good fun was had by all. See I told you there’d be an equipment/travel post, I must be clairvoyant! Now I’m off to put the lottery on!
