Commercial Shoot: Total Fitness of Battle Ground

1/16/10 – Rebecca Getsfrid – Commercial/Advertising Portrait Photographer in Vancouver, WA and Portland, OR

Up today at 11:30am – the break of dawn – to shoot some commercial images for Total Fitness of Battle Ground, who had seen the work I did for the Tae Kwon Do class that works out of there last year. It was also a chance to use the DA(STAR) 16-50/2.8 in my kind of situation: ISO 100 and Flashes. I thought the shots from the basketball courts were ok, but ISO4500 is not what this lens was made for. Having seen now what it can do, it’s a keeper, and I can’t forsee it leaving my camera anytime soon.

I shot two setups, and although we had set aside an hour for the shoot, we were done in half that.

Here’s the light test for the first setup I shot:

Click here for actual pixels.

The colors are incredible. The sharpness, beautiful. The contrast, orgasmic. The chromatic aberration I was worried about last night is completely gone at f/4.

Here’s the shot we chose:

I like everything but the green glow of that fluorescent light in the top right of frame. It was cropped out of the final image, but I want to show “straight from camera” here (discounting the 2 clicks of color correction by X-Rite). I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to crosslight like I had planned with there being a wall right behind the elliptical machines. Thankfully there’s an office with a window attached to that wall, and I was able to shoot through there thanks to the wirelessness of the Cybersyncs.



While I had some plans to shoot in their weight room, the place was filled with mirrors on every wall. It would have been an absolute headache, so we just took a weight bar upstairs to their aerobics room and made due. I’m glad we did.



It’s more crosslighting, since I love crosslighting: softbox front camera right, 7″ reflector on the flash left and behind her. I slowed the shutter to 1/90th to bring a bit more fill in the room so that it would be more cohesive with the first setup. I like how the window keeps the negative space from feeling too negative, while still leaving room for any copy the gym wishes to add.