So this is a bit of a hard left turn from my usual work. No flowers… no white dress…
My friend Bryan runs a very successful podcast about comics called Comic Geek Speak. Their reach is wide-spread enough where they, for the second time now, hosted their own convention (SuperShow 2010) up in Reading, PA a little over a week ago. I was tagged to show up and shoot some photos of the con again this year. Lots of fun! Had a great time walking around and taking pictures of the many artists there doing their thing.
One of the groups that was there was the 501st. If you don’t know what/who they are… they do Star Wars costumes. Really really well. If you’re into Star Wars, check them out! They were out and about, walking around in full costume to the great entertainment of all! I got a couple of pictures of kids just staring at Chewbacca (who stood well over 7 feet tall by my eye-balled measurement). Darth Vader was also an imposing figure, as always. They also did a panel discussion on how these costumes are made, which was really very cool.
One of the other things that they had going at the show was an area where there were tables set up, and lots of different board games. Kevin from Sieze Your Turn was there, lending out board games and teaching people how to play them. As I was making my rounds, he stopped me. He said he really wanted a shot of some Storm Troopers playing a board game, and could I make that happen? So we did it up! I ran out to my car, grabbed a few bits of additional gear… we pulled the guys in costume in… and there it is! We actually got lucky because we originally planned on just the troopers, but Chewey and Starkiller were walking by and decided to jump in on the action!
If you’re scratching your head and wondering how this was done; Two lights. One behind (Vivitar 285hv triggered with PocketWizard), and very slightly camera left with a make-shift snoot pointed at the game board/tiles, and one (580exII) on camera, bounced upwards with bounce card out for fill. The snooted light, because it was not an overly long snoot, provided the rim on Chewbacca and Starkiller. I took a bunch of different exposures, and settled on a relatively neutral one. Since this was shot in a conference room while stuff was going on and not in a studio, there were a few challenges… and some things left to be fixed in Photoshop. (And yes, there was extensive photoshop work done to the image.) I wound up manually merging three different exposure settings of the same shot in Photoshop, did a bunch of clean up work which included removing the light stand and the flash behind the table, did some dodging and burning to accent certain things, lots of curves… and the like.
