Photo by August Bradley

For a Los Angeles Fashion Week presentation at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, I was commissioned to do a series of dramatic fashion images to be mounted on four-by-eight foot panels.  The producers and I also wanted to create a short film companion piece.

We would be shooting the project at a very unique venue, The Edison in downtown Los Angeles – famous for it’s alternate-future, post-industrial sci-fi atmosphere.  This is one of the most remarkable interior designs in the city.  However, we had very little time at the location so our biggest challenge was time management and efficient use of the limited access. As a result, we could only have one lighting setup to shoot both the stills and the motion.  And that lighting setup had to be lightweight for the numerous quick transitions to different spots within the venue.

Photo by August Bradley

The typical solution would have been to use filmmaking constant light sources, bright enough to shoot the stills under.  But those constant lights are very hot, and would require additional power from generators.  From a creative standpoint, I would also have far less control over the big constant film lights than I’m used to from the Broncolor gear with it’s brightness variability and the far more versatile range of light-shaping modifiers (plus color temperature consistency).  Precision lighting and dramatic use of shadow was a big part of the style of this piece.

The new HDSLR cameras, such as the Canon 5D MkII that we used for the motion footage, have made low-light video shooting far more viable (a major development with big implications as discussed here). As a result, we discovered after some testing that we could shoot the motion footage with the Broncolor modeling lights.  This would give us the tremendous benefit of the lighting ratios established for the still shots already being perfectly balanced for the video shots, and the heads being already positioned for the transition to motion.

Photo by August Bradley

By keeping the light sources so low-powered, it also permitted us to mix our lighting with the accents of the existing ambient light.  The dark atmosphere we were shooting in was an important part of this lighting scenario working so well.

With the Scoro packs set to “P5” for the modeling lights, we had the brightest capability of the modeling bulb, while maintaining the ratios of each head at their various power settings relative to each other.  The “high” model light setting would have put the modeling bulbs at their highest power, regardless of the power setting for the strobes.

The biggest inconsistency in switching between the flashtube for the stills and the modeling light for motion footage is the color temperature – the flashtubes are daylight and the modeling lights are tungsten.  To even them out would require adding gels when switching between stills and motion, but the warmer tungsten color was a big advantage in terms of mixing with the ambient lights of the venue.

In this case, the stills were the priority so we used the tools most capable of getting the best still photographs possible (Scoro, Unilite heads, and a wide range of light-shaping modifiers).  We also used 90% of the time shooting the stills – this was foremost a museum photography exhibition.  As a result, we shot only a small amount of motion footage.  But since the lighting tools were the same, we were ready to shoot the second we switched cameras.  Without this lighting versatility, the motion footage would have been impossible.

More of August Bradley’s work, including a wider range of images form this shoot, can be seen at: www.AugustBradley.com .  He also has several new motion pieces in development, you can view and subscribe to the August Bradley YouTube Channel here