The cool thing about living in LA

Hey everyone,

as you might know, LA is the world's biggest movie city. Movie city means a lot of young aspiring actors, dancers and models leave in the area and everybody is looking for a perfect headshot to be spotted.

While I am not generally considering myself as a portrait photographer, I do these kinds of things a lot more recently, especially when shooting for the Cabaret.

So when Tricia, a friend of mine asked if I could do her headshot I was thrilled.

Luckily, literally the day of the photoshoot, I received my new favorite lens in the mail. I just bought a Canon FD 55mm f1.2 on ebay. And with a little adapter I can put it on my Sony NEX-6 camera. I can tell you I am already in love with this lens. I'll do a more in-depth review later but my initial impressions are great.

Here are the shots I got from it that day. Of course having a beautiful model like Tricia helps a lot to get gorgeous shots like this ;)



The 10$ softbox

Hey guys,

today I thought I was going to share a little DIY i made to prepare for the photoshoot with the Cabaret Versatile last week end.

I am going to try to teach you how to build a softbox for less than 10$.

Hdere we go, first of all I early had the lamp socket. I bought 2 used softboxes from a friend a while back, and he gave me a spare head like this one. Only problem, I did not have any modifiers for it. So I decided to build my own. Because I already had 2 big softboxes I went for a small, more transportable one.

I had a spare head like this.

I went to home depot and found this really cool plant pot in the gardening section

I simply had to cut a hole in it to make the head fit inside, I use the light head to trace a circle of the same diameter at the back of the pot and cut it with cisors.

 

I then hot glued some aluminium fold on the inside of the pot (for reflection)

To finish it I used a piece of white fabric that i cut a bit larger than the size of the pot, I put Velcro on the fabric and the side of the pot. (hot glued and stapled on the pot and a sewed the other half on the fabric) 

I use economical 5000K bulbs inside, it takes a bit of time to warm up but the results are pretty cool. 

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And there you go, the most expensive part of this tutorial was the pot that i found for $8 at home depot. I tested it on the field and the lights from it looks great.  It is a very cool portable complement to my 2 other softboxes.

Hope you enjoyed!

Jeremy

 

Shooting the Cabaret Versatile at Federal Bar in Noho

Hi everybody,

what a busy week end it was! I was lucky enough to spend the day at a beautiful location for a photoshoot this saturday.

The Federal Bar in North Hollywood let me and the Cabaret Versatile girls (and guys!) use their rooms for a photoshoot. I was in charge of capturing the awesomeness of the troup which was pretty easy given the talent these guys have. Between acrobats, stilts and beautiful girls I could not have come back without a few keepers.

It's funny that I actually was not too much into studio shoots but more into landscapes and animals, but in the end I think we pulled it of.

For the setup I used 2 continuous lights with 24x36 softboxes and a third smaller one that I build myself (more on that later). We moved the liths quite a bit during the shoot, but overall it was pretty easy to get what I wanted. Most of the shots were taken with my Sony NEX-6 (which I am selling, see here), I used the sigma 19mm f2.8 and the sigma 30mm f2.8 for most of the shots.

Here are a few of my favorite shots from that day.

I have a lot of new exiting stuff coming up, I'll be shooting headshots for a few friends and I'll soon post a little DIY tutorial to build your own softbox for less than 10$!

Stay tuned

Jeremy