Trainers Artemis and Eric

Needham, MA 112711 My trainer friend Artemis Scantalides and I have been talking about updating her website photos for about a year and it finally happened a couple of weeks back. She and her business partner, Eric Gahan, are both personal trainers and they specialize in kettle bells training. TECH STUFF: The studio in which they train GStarfit in Needham, MA is a pretty cool studio with all the accoutrements of the trade. Big olympic cages, straps, barbells,medicine balls, exercise balls, etc, etc and a good amount of windows all over the place. From a photo shoot point of view, this basically translates into a lot of competing visual elements. Since this was about showcasing Artemis and Eric I decided to go with a black velvet background and side lights. However I hadn't realized their uniforms were black and the kettle bells they use were also black. This presented a lighting problem: I was working with people dressed in black, against a black backdrop (black velvet is the best when you want to drop the background out because it swallows the light), using a black prop (the kettle bells). I realized I needed to off set so much black by pointing spotlights in all of these elements to makes them stand out from the background. So the set up is as follow: Two autopoles against the ceiling, a crossbar and a custom-made black velvet backdrop. I used a strip softbox (14" x 56") to one side, a hair-light with a wide grid on it coming straight down from above and behind them. In the shot with the two of them I had one spotlight right behind them pointing at them so I could get a nice rim-backlight effect. And finally I had my assistant Timothy Dunn, hand hold another spot light and his job was to keep following the movement of the kettle bells as they executed training moves. EQUIPMENT: 2 battery packs, a 2400 and a 1200 watt Elite packs, three to four lights depending on the shot. One camera- a D-3S, and two lenses: 70- 200mm and the 24-70mm both 2.8s. The ISO was 100, the setting for the camera was RAW + JPG. I was pretty satisfied with the results and so were my clients.