White Balance, Gels and Cell Phones.

Today we shot some real fun photographs for CWB. The one part of the shoot took us to the 24th story of the of the CWB building. We were shooting some office culture photographs in a lunch room when I looked out and saw a corner of the building that peaked out at a 90angle looking out into the distance.

I asked our art director what he thought about putting some employees in an office and shooting them from the other part of the building.

(this is pre post production... want to know why? because you can see the messy desk and the Quadra in the bottom right, we just couldnt move it ant further to the right)

The AD went for it so I sent Aaron (my assistant) around the building to set up the lights. Because the windows on the CWB building are tinted green, there were some color issues shooting through my window into Aarons window.

I really wanted to have an over the top" blue" exterior with a warm glow lighting up the office. To do this I white balanced to tungsten and doubled up the light with full tungsten orange gels. Once I nailed the warm look, we shot a few images with a custom white balance and the naked light with no gels.

(dosent Aaron look happy? No? Its ok, because we started this morning at 8:30am)

To make this happen Aaron and I were communicating via cell phones with Aaron relaying my movement directions to the employees.

I shot this with the Canon 1ds mark 3, with a 50mm 1.2 and a circular polarizer to minimize reflections in Aarons window. I triggered the Elinchrom Quadra (one) with pocket wizards.

This set up was more complex than I would typically like (I tend to like more realistic photographs), but I think this rendered some interesting results.

C