The style of street shooting is something I have had an interest in for some time. Due to my personality, genuine street shooting is something which I am not very well suited for, but the styles of street photography itself, be it the street fashion of The Sartorialist persuasion, or the candid “in-the-moment” shots associated with that particular genre, have been things I had been wishing to incorporate into my own work.
So when itakoaya suggested a shoot for her Ranka with a theme of night-time shopping, I knew it was time to pull that “run-and-gun” style out, and see what we could do on the streets of Sydney CBD. In a way, this shoot is a spiritual successor of the Evangelion Christmas shoot from 2010, both in terms of subject and style. Still, despite having (theoretically) improved in skills over the course of a year, I faced a number of challenges during this shoot.
The first is, running and gunning as a shoot style isn’t something I myself am very good at. I knew from a number of shoots I had done during the evening hours that if I wasn’t careful, I would end up with very dead eyes with no specular highlights in them at all. That was something I needed to avoid, so adding my own lights was a given.
We started using an LED panel that ita brought. This is a constant light source with around 3 times the surface area of a flash, and it’s pretty bright (but of course not as bright as a flash). However, I immediately ran into problems (as predicted to a degree) in terms of the colour temperature that the LEDs put out, which had a greenish hue that did not work too well when mixed with the incandescent that many window displays have. The plastic orange colour filter did not convert the colour to incandescent orange properly. In the end I decided to put the panel away and go with the familiar remote flash method.
Of course, when looking at a highly mobile shoot, I wouldn’t bring a light stand. I had the fabulous Takuyar helping out, however, and I just put the flash onto her camera’s hot shoe and arbitrarily positioned her to light ita.
When shooting around the city, mixed colour lights is unavoidable, and getting a consistent look throughout the whole shoot is a post-processing challenge. I just shot manual with a fixed white balance for flash since it wouldn’t make sense to waste too much time at the shoot itself trying to get all the colours right. Changing factors include of course the various display windows, the sky’s descent into darkness, etc. Anyway, that partly explains the decision to use retro-style colouring in the final results.
The other reason was that I just felt that retro colouring suited what we were doing. I wanted to transform the normal Sydney that I know with its vibrant blue skies into something a bit dreamy and romantic. “How would Sydney look if it were a European city?” That was part of what I was thinking, perhaps inspired by the beret of the cosplay.
You can check out the results here:
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