I recently had a great shoot for my portfolio, emulating a trail running editorial like you might find in Outdoor Magazine. We put together a great team consisting of myself shooting, Model Melice Ndamba Bell, MUA Brii Rose, Stylist Jose, my photo assistants my bro Alex Martin and his roommate Cole Nowicki and my dog Tako. We had a great time out on the trails around Cypress Falls in West Vancouver. I know I learned a lot about directing a larger crew than I am used to working with and I think everyone got some good experience and some good photos for there portfolios. I hope I do a lot more of these TFP shoots in the near future to build up my portfolio with better commercial and editorial content.
For equipment I had my Nikon d7000 bady with Tokina 11-16 2.8 and 28-70 2.8 lenses. I had my assistants hand holding speedlights on boom poles to allow quick setup and adjustment in the woods. Light modifiers were a Westcott Apollo medium soft box for key and a bare flash head zoomed to 200mm for the rim light. Radio triggers were Cactus V5 transceivers.
I played around with mixing ambient light levels, in the dark woods I was dropping to as low as 1/20th of a second to get detail in the background and give a sense of motion to the water in the creek. If I were to do it again I would add a third light for a fill to make for a less contrasty image. And I would also book a couple more models to make better use of the MUA and stylists time on set.
We ended up straying from the original running concept and shot a few hiking/ posing shots on a really nice looking mossy bit of trail. These turned out to be some of my favorite shots from the day.
After a few hours of good times and productive shooting we started to make our way over to the last location I had scouted. Along the way we stopped to get a couple shots near a cliff edge when all of a sudden Jose and Brii go running and screaming off up the trail. Me, Melice, Alex, Cole, and Tako kept shooting for a few minutes before realizing we were standing next to a wasp nest and were being swarmed. We got out of there as safely as possible and re-grouped to asses the damage. Brii got the worst of it with seven or eight stings on her legs, I got one in the armpit, Melice was stung on the hand and my dog Tako got stung on the ear and his butt. Luckily no one was allergic but it did teach me to be more prepared when taking a group out into the woods. I have since stocked up my first aid kit and will have it with me on all future location shoots.
