New Tutorial: Shooting The Army

Garry Edwards · 25 May 2016

Well, it's SORT of a tutorial...
What happened here was that one of our customers, Jamie Rowland, won first prize in our monthly photo competition a few months back, and part of his prize was a day in our studio.
Jamie is ex forces and strongly supports charities such as Help For Heros, and works hard for them.
His views are irrelevant because he won the prize, but as it happens we're strongly supportive of our military too, in fact one of our own people is a reservist, and we are also approved suppliers to the military.

Anyway, a group of the biggest and toughest-looking army rugby players came along to our studio and we all had a great day. You can see from their patches and cap badges exactly why they're a tough bunch, or maybe it was something to do with their rugby playing. Whatever, they really got stuck in and their attitude when Jamie took shots of them diving on to a tiny airbed, hoping that they wouldn't miss it and end up face first on the concrete floor, impressed me.
https://www.lencarta.com/studio-lighting-blog/05/tutorial-shooting-the-army-part-1/#.V0VptuSGOhE

HoppyUK · 25 May 2016

Wow. Seriously good Garry! Many congrats to Jamie for winning and bringing such a great subject to the studio (lucky it's big!). A really excellent set of images - and some top learning to be had

Ten out of ten all round. Jamie, the guys and girls, the pictures, the video production, and Lencarta

MidnightUK · 25 May 2016

Well done all and thanks for posting the shoot up.

Garry Edwards · 25 May 2016

HoppyUK said:
Wow. Seriously good Garry! Many congrats to Jamie for winning and bringing such a great subject to the studio (lucky it's big!). A really excellent set of images - and some top learning to be had

Ten out of ten all round. Jamie, the guys and girls, the pictures, the video production, and Lencarta

Thanks. The studio is in fact quite a bit bigger now than when you visited. I think that our video guy did very well, because he was literally just walking around shooting on the fly (normally we have several video cameras in fixed positions) to avoid getting in the way.
We're going to create another video, showing how it was done (rather than what was done, as in this video) but that's on the back burner at the mo because we're very busy.

Garry Edwards · 7 Jun 2016

And here's the second part of the tutorial
When we can do it, we will also produce a second video from the material that we already have, and this one will be more of a "how it's done" than an overview of what was done.
But, it's on the back burner because our video guy is away for a couple of weeks, and will come back to a backlog of work.

Kingo46 · 7 Jun 2016

they're NOT a tough bunch apart from the female Sgt from the RA

enjoy reading the tutorial

david357 · 7 Jun 2016

Another useful resource, thanks Garry.

Garry Edwards · 8 Jun 2016

Kingo46 said:
they're NOT a tough bunch apart from the female Sgt from the RA enjoy reading the tutorial

Well, they seemed pretty tough to me - they were throwing themselves around in the dive shots, not knowing and not seeming to even care whether they landed on the concrete floor or the airbed

And one of them, a para, amused himself by constantly lifting up a couple of old car batteries that we were using to balance people's height in some shots - I can just about lift one of them, once...