RobertBenson.com

This is one unedited image from the shoot for a local restaurant.

I haven’t really been able to breath for about five days because I’ve been neck deep in a huge advertising photo shoot for a local casino outside of San Diego.

I slept 13 hours last night, making up for the three hours I got the previous night, the day before the photo shoot, which began at 4 a.m.. Thought I’d write a bit about what went into this shoot, because it reveals that picture taking is just a small part of the job. There’s a blow by blow account of the shoot on the next page, complete with lighting descriptions, diary journals (kind of), and behind the scenes logistics.

The client contacted me about two weeks ago asking me to bid on the shoot. The photos I shot will be used to promote a season special the casino will be conducting at the buffet restaurant there. They had mock ups of the print advertisement. In it, they wanted to show a couple at a buffet line, being served delicious looking food, and having the time of their lives. The print advertisement will be used as direct mail, in casino displays and possibly in billboard format.

I’ve done a lot of work for the casino in the past and got the job. That’s when the work began. Two weeks leading up to the shoot. Some of the things I did:

• Created a working webpage with shoot information. This page can be see AT THE WORKING WEBPAGE HERE. It was updated more than 35 times, and included information on the shoot schedule, models, assistant information, etc. It was designed as a place the art director, producer, assistants, make up lady and others involved in the shoot could go to see the latest logistical information.

• Scouted the location. I went to the casino with my shoot assistant, Dave Good. There we met with two of the marketing staff members who were producing and art directing the advertisement. We looked at the buffet area, a huge space with five or so different restaurants catering to different food tastes. We chose an Italian area within the buffet, because unlike the other restaurants, it offered a lot of internal space to hide lights, had a nice background, and a lot of moving space for me to shoot different angles and variations on what they wanted. You can see scouting pictures AT THE WORKING WEBPAGE HERE.

• Pick the chefs. A chef interacting with a our couples (models) was a big part of the ad, so we conducted quick interviews with more than 20 different chefs and cooks at the casino. That included mugshots of each of them. And through casual conversation, we narrowed the 20 chefs down to three of the best. Decisions were made primarily on their personality (we wanted someone who knew how to have fun), their ethnicity, command of the language, willingness to participate and a few other factors. You can see mugshots of the chefs AT THE WORKING WEBPAGE HERE.

• Selected a make up artist. I’ve worked with Marylou Gamballa in the past, a local professional hair and make up lady. She’s really good and we planned to use her, but the night before the shoot, she called and said she was sick. In her place, she recommended Claire Young, who we used instead. She performed brilliantly.

• Scouted for models. This ate up a good 35 hours of my time over the course of a week. Many times the client will oversee this duty, but I was asked to find models, and agreed to do it. The client wanted three very specific couples: an African American couple in their 40s, a Hispanic couple in their 40s, and a Caucasian couple in their 50s. To find these models, I went to Craigslist.com, onemodelplace.com, talked with previous models I’ve worked with, talked with an actor friend I have worked with who had access to a database of local actors and models, and talked to a couple modeling agencies. The finalists were AT THE WORKING WEBPAGE HERE. We ended up using four professional agency models (BIG bucks) and two “street models” who I scouted on my own (Carolyn and Merrick).

• Endless conversations with the producer. On her end, food preparations were worked out, a food stylist was hired, input on models was exchanged, wardrobe was discussed, timelines were reviewed, hotel reservations were made (me and the two assistants, an out of area model and the producer all stayed at the hotel since set up for the shoot started at 4 a.m.), etc etc.

• Gear rental. I supplemented my own lighting and gear with some rental gear, which included two C stands, a boom arm, a 39 meg Hasselblad digital camera, two Profoto heads, and an octabank. For the actual shoot, I used all that, two other medium softboxes as hair and fill lights, two gridded lights to accent food and two background lights to light certain areas of the restaurant in the background. In the end I ended up using my own full frame Canon DSLR for speed of use. The Hasselblad was tethered to a fast desktop PC with flat screen monitor. The camera saves files as an 80 meg raw files, and converts them to a 110 meg tiff file. Ridiculous.

• The shoot. Set up time for the shoot began at 4:15 a.m. We had to shoot early, because the restaurant opened for business at 10 a.m. Dave, Rob Hammer (the second assistant) and I carted three valet carts full of gear to the buffet area and started setting up. Chefs and the food stylist began preparing the food. Models arrived at 5:30, and immediately sat down for hair and make up work with Claire. The food stylist, by the way, had almost as much crap as we did with the three valet carts. She had everything from hair irons, to blow torches to Elmer’s glue. Shooting began at 6:30 and went non stop until 9:45 a.m., some 1,300 frames later. During the shoot we shot one couple, with “extras” milling in the background playing the part of guests. Every 10 minutes or so we swapped out couples and chefs, so the client had a good variation with demographics. After the shoot, at 9:45 a.m., me and the two assistants, the make up lady and models all scrambled to clear the space, so the restaurant could open at 10 a.m.

• The second shoot. The couple having fun was to be the front side of the direct mail piece, and on the back they were going to have a small inset picture of food on a plate. So we set up in a back, quiet area of the restaurant and spent the next three hours photographing three plates of food which the food stylist prepared. For the food, I used two small softboxes lighting the plates from the rear mainly for fill, and a main light – a gridded light coming in from the side, raking across the food and adding contrast and texture. On the opposite side of the main gridded light I had white and aluminum foil reflectors, along with four tiny mirrors that were hand held by the two assistants to light small sections of the food. There are photographers who shoot food for a living, and my hat is off to them. I don’t specialize in this type of photography, and it’s definitely an art.

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  This was the lighting set up for the plates we shot...