Sunday, April 26, 2009

The Biggest Loser

This is Bill Germanakos the winner of the 4th season of The Biggest Loser. What a great guy and believe me, no loser. He was a pro in front of the camera, funny and just made my life as a photographer easy. I appreciated having my son Daniel assisting me on this shoot. These shots were for the Sensible Portions company.
We began this day by setting up and shooting Bill and a grocery cart full of product in a Costco parking lot. It was hot and the light was too, so we took some light of Bill with a big white umbrella.

After we had lots of shots out there, we moved into the store and did shots with Bill against shelving filled with product. While Costco has plenty of power outlets all around the outside of the store, there don't seem to be any as you move toward the center. That, of course, was where we had to shoot. Fortunately, I had a small Sunpack strobe in my case, so I stuck it on my camera, slowed down the shutter speed to brighten up the florescents overhead and shot tethered to my MacBook Pro so I could see exactly how the shots were looking. Our final shots took place outside the offices where we set up a 1/2 wide white seamless, and lit Bill nicely with a bank and strobe. That is the shot at the top. I have moved the extract plug-in from CS3 to CS4 and used that to easily strip Bill away from the mostly white background.
Okay, I shot using my beloved S3 using Fuji's Studio Utility to save to a certain folder and then launched Lightroom and set it to watch that folder. My clients love to see the big images as we shoot. We got home late, but still I was able to do a quick cleanup of the files in Lightroom and then gererate a flash web site. I emailed my client the link and I got choices back from John (the client) by 10PM the same night! Hey folks, digital rocks! Don't let anyone tell you differently. Gee, John seems to be working way too hard...

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