Braiiiiiins

7/4/10 – Rebecca Getsfrid – Environmental Portrait Photographer in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon

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Drove up to Seattle last night to shoot some photos of the 2010 Fremont Zombie Walk, as they attempted – and succeeded – to break the previous world record of number of zombies in one place.

As much as I knew it would kill my back, I opted to lug around the 20 pound Vagabond II battery pack and the Alien Bees Ring Flash.. It may have killed me physically, but the results were 100% worth it.

Obviously, whenever there was a good solid background, it was easy to get a traditional Ring Flash look. The real power in the ring flash that day, however, was its hand-holdability and power. In the middle of summer with the day as bright as it is, to darken the skies at flash sync speed, you really need to be shooting up in the f/11-f/16 area, and ramming the flash all the way up to full power with the vagabond on “fast” mode, I was getting 1 second recycles of f/16 at about 4 or 5 feet.

To keep weight down, I brought only the 50/1.4. It’s a good focal length for the ring, and its inability to zoom meant I wouldn’t have to bother myself with sliding the camera in and out and trying to zoom while holding the body with one hand, the flash with the other and twisting the zoom ring with…. yeah.

I teamed up with a group of hunters, people whose sole job for the day was to set up ambush points and barrage the zombie hordes with nerf darts and foam swords. My hope was that this would let me make sure I get where the action was, but to be entirely honest, I couldn’t reliably get close enough to the action to get the shots I was envisioning. Worse still, the screw holding the camera to the flash bracket kept coming loose.



The backgrounds while walking around also tended to be a bit too busy for my tastes, and while I could milk good stuff out of them through photoshop, I really didn’t want to have to locally darken every image of the day (ended up being 245 total)



I eventually just found for myself a spot where I knew the hordes would be crossing, got a nice low angle, hand held the flash off camera, pointing slightly up relative to the lens, and just shot as the zombies went by. The low angle ensured a relatively clean background (usually the sky, made unnaturally dark by the power of the flash, which was what I was hoping for.



For those unfamiliar with it, the Alien Bees Ring Flash is a fully manual light, which means I have to calculate exposure based on distance on the fly. When shooting fast paced zombie action, that often means over or underexposed shots. While I was able to boost exposure on the underexposed ones in post, there was little I could do about overexposure. On the “bright” side, when shooting material like this, the overexposure can actually end up looking really pretty sweet.



The best shots, by far, were when the zombie actors would really get into their role, see me with my weird looking flash and expensive looking camera, and get right up in my face, not knowing how close they would actually be because of the 50mm (times 1.4 crop) lens. That kind of visceral action is not something you can easily coax out of people who don’t feel comfortable doing it, and makes for amazing images.



Lastly, there were a surprising number of families with younger kids in attendance, which was absolutely awesome. To see families doing something together that’s so far outside the normal boundaries of what’s acceptable in society, and showing their kids that it’s ok to be different and have fun and go around being crazy, is incredibly cool.


Left: No clarity. Right: Clarity

If you notice that the images don’t look entirely natural, besides the unnatural lighting, it’s because I slammed the clarity slider in Lightroom all the way up to 100 for every shot. If you were to shoot an older person or someone with bad skin and do that, it would make them look absolutely hideous; but when you’ve got people with zombie makeup and fake flesh hanging off their faces, it adds a darkness and depth to their look which is perfect for this kind of thing.

Lastly, one of my favorite shots, that I couldn’t find a way to work naturally into the blog post: