Michael Fragomeni, the genius behind the decibels at Sounds Xplosive Audio (http://www.soundsxplosive.com.au) really is a genius in the car audio world. Michael has been breaking records and achieving world wide recognition for his work for over a decade.  Being such a master of audio, he has been a remarkable help on the set of filming some short films lately. He was responsible for the high quality stereo sound we captured for my very own first ever short film “Burnout” (to be released soon) and was also present with me on set of “Exotic Engagement”, a short film by award winning Director A.J. Carter. Anyway, we caught up a little while back to capture some new promotional images for himself and his company and the above image is the product of that.

The lightning photo is one I took in the early years of my photography with a entry level Canon 300D camera and a kit lens. It’s a good picture to show people that you don’t need a fancy camera to produce great images! It’s an amazing picture that I have been dying to use for so long, and here was my chance! The end result looks great and we all love it. Now lets talk about how I did it!

This is my favourite lighting setup that I like to use. It’s a 3 light setup. 2 strobes behind your subject at roughly 45 degree angles, which are the strobes with softboxes attached in this image to the left. Ideally I would like to use strip boxes which is a thin tall softbox, but I don’t own any of those so I used these softboxes. I tried using bare strobes without any modifiers but I found I much preferred the light from the softbox. It seemed to wrap around the subject much better. Then the third light is an overhead beauty dish lighting the subject from the front. The key to this lighting setup if you want to create drama is to setup the beauty dish to only provide fill light. You want those rim lights to be the main lights, and just a tiny bit of fill to bring up the detail in the face. I think I broke my own rule and had a little too much power running through it for this shot, but that’s ok we got what we wanted.

With the help of photoshop these days you don’t need to shoot on a green screen or in a studio of any kind. Extracting people off a background can be fairly easy especially when you light your subject in a certain way such as this one.  For this extraction I used a basic selection of Michael (subject) and then refined it using the refine edge tool. Then I converted the selection into a mask and did any further touch ups by simply painting with a white or black brush. Now that Michael is extracted, I simply placed him onto a Layer above my Lightning layer. I had already applied a gradient of colour to my lightning shot. You can see the bit of red and orange I added to give it a bit more drama. Once it was together, I simply sprinkled some more fairy dust on the photo and tweaked it up a little bit, including desaturating it a bit and bumping up the contrast and ta-daaa! Here is our finished product.

Anyway, another happy customer. Keep up the good work Michael. Check out the insane car audio installations and achievements Michael has made on his website here: www.soundsxplosive.com.au

Happy Shooting,

B.