This is the final post covering a concept shoot with Rachel and around 300 vinyl records. As mentioned in the previous post the records were all classical discards from a bookfest that my wife is involved with.  In this shoot we recreated the famous flower scene from “American Beauty”.

For this set in addition to the records on the backdrop I covered the flooring with them. 

I positioned Rachel on the floor and then used records or pose to shoot. The camera was at the end of a boom arm over her. As it was tethered to the computer I was able to control it. Using the the boom enabled me to get the camera positioned level. This is much more preferable than standing on a stool and trying to take the shot.

The lighting was the same as the previous two posts. It consisted of a Godox AD600 shooting into a 1.5m softbox. This was positioned at Rachel’s head and shot along her body. The light was also elevated and then angled down. At the rear of the room my Elinchrom D400 was shooting into a 7 foot umbrella with diffusion covering it. This light was being fired by an optical slave built in.

In addition to the overhead shots I did shoot some from floor level so that we had a variety.

All of the images in this post were shot on my Lumix G9. The setting was 1/200s f8 ISO200. The focal lengths ranged was 24mm.

The angle of the main light did mean that I was getting some reflection/hotspots in some of the records. This was a relatively simple adjustment to fix in post. In the final images I also cloned in more records to fill blank spots on the floor. Some were also needed when I created the images using the 1.91:1 ratio used for Instagram landscape images.

The whole afternoon was enjoyable and Rachel really loved the Images that we produced during the sessions.