Ronan’s Escape was written and directed by Australian film maker, A.J. Carter and was shot on 35mm and Super 16mm in the summer of 2008 and 2009 on location here in Western Australia.

The premiere took place at HOYTS Cinemas, Southlands as part of their local filmmaker initiative on 15th Feb 2010. Director and old friend A.J. was very keen for me to come down and take some red carpet snaps to give everyone involved in this project a little extra something to remember it by and to make the occasion shine a bit more. Sure! Why not?

Just before I babble on about the gear and setup I used for the photos, I need to throw in a quick CONGRATULATIONS. Ronan’s Escape has just won ‘BEST SHORT FILM’ at the SEDONA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (USA)! This is an incredible achievement and I’m extremely happy for the success of this film, and the recognition that A.J and his production team have received. The win was was well deserved. Check out the film at http://www.ronansescape.com/

Ok, now back to the premiere. I was very lucky that I wasn’t going to have to compete with 30 other blood sucking crazed photo-journalists to try get some good shots like you might see at a typical Hollywood premiere. This was on a slightly smaller scale.  I was going to be all alone to control the whole occasion. So straight away I knew I was going to be packing my quick and easy portable speedlight kit. It varies in contents but usually I’ve got my main body, the Canon 5D MK II, and usually a backup 30D lingering around somewhere. For the lighting side of things, I’ll squeeze in 3 or 4 Canon speedlights (with at least one 580EX to trigger the others) and a couple light stands, hotshoe adapters, and of course a couple of brollies to soften the light.  Thanks to Lowepro, I can manage to carry all that in one go. 100% wireless system, lightweight, and very portable.

Hit the jump to see how I shot the red carpet…

Ok so red carpet.. how on earth are you supposed to light that? Well here’s what I did. I setup two light stands  on either side of the red carpet which was about 4 feet wide. Each stand was equipped with a slave 430EX II speedlight and an umbrella. On one I used a shoot-through umbrella, and the other I used a reflective silver umbrella. There’s no real science behind my choice there, I definately wanted a shoot-through umbrella because I’m religous about those things now, and to be honest I think thats the only one I had at the time. A silver lined umbrella will bring in a slightly more defined light with a bit more impact, so the lighting will vary a bit across the subject which is ok.

Now these things wont magically fire on their own so I needed to secure the 580 EX II into the hot shoe and set that puppy to master mode. What this is going to do is trigger my two remote flashes (430EX II’s) which are of course set to

slave mode.  The important thing to note here, which you will find I do a lot, is to turn the flash off, for the speedlight in the hot-shoe. So in the flash controls on the 580EX which was mounted on my camera, I set its flash to OFF. This means it wont contribute any light to the photo, it will only fire a pre-flash to trigger my slave flashes. Very cool for off-camera lighting.

Now I prefer to shoot faces rather than the back of heads, so I aimed these lights directly down the red carpet, and awaited for the people to walk towards me. I would casually stop each group and persuade them they wanted to have a photo taken. Some are always more willing than others and some just want to get the hell out of there!  To get a bit of ambient into the shot i just opened up my aperature a bit, kicked up the ISO a bit, and started dragging the shutter until I was happy with the results. Remember, when your using flash, you can drag the shutter more because the flash duration is the shutter speed for your subject!

Enough from me, heres a few keepers below…

These were all pretty much straight from the camera, maybe a tiny lightroom adjustment here and there.