Incase you haven’t already noticed, I was out on assignment with the Top Shelf Entertainment boys once again very recently. These “go to the gym way more than me” guys provide all your typical adult entertainment but what you probably don’t know is that some of these guys are actually professional dancers too. Leigh, the head-honcho over at Top Shelf has been breakdancing and bopping to the hip hop beats himself for over 10 years. If you have been to one of their stage shows you would have noticed the talent within the group, but I think what you will come to see more of in the near future, is much more emphasis on dance and brilliant choreography. But thats just my thoughts, stay tuned to www.topshelfentertainment.com.au to find out for yourself.

Ok ok ok I know you just want the photo stuff right? Here we go read on here…

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So personally I’m not the biggest fan of big group shoots, something just seems daunting about them, but it can be fun and a nice challenge.  I always seem to manage ok and I’m pretty happy with the results from this shoot as shown above. What do you think of the shot? Drop me a comment.  Anyway, we were very lucky to find this neat location all of about 50 feet from the Top Shelf Entertainment office, which is a dream for location shooting. A big industrial bin, a metallic backdrop, some crates, and a massive earthquake-like crack in the bitchumen, what a cool spot! Well ok… maybe I added that last part in post production.

So for this shoot I dragged out the Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS Kit and I threw on my big 53″ Octabox on one of the heads. This was my big soft main light to handle the important stuff. It sat on the end of a boom stand off to the cameras left.  I could have lit this entire thing with speedlights, and in the past I would have, but now that I have the Elinchrom Ranger at my disposal I like to set it up as my main light, and that gives me extra Canon Speedlights like the 430EX II and 580EX II to play with in the rest of the shot! Now if you know what an Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS Kit is, you will know that it can only cater for two heads. So I had the second head way off to camera right with the help of one of those heavy duty elinchrom 4m extension cables. Best thing I ever bought!

So now we have a shot, but it isn’t quite complete. Time for the Canon speedlights to make an appearance! So looking at our scene above our poor bin-dweller over in the back left was looking a little dim, probably about a stop under-exposed. So way off to camera left we setup a Canon 430EX II on a light stand,  zoomed in to about 50mm and fired that in towards the centre of the bin at about 1/4- 1/2 power. I forget.  That evens up the shot  nicely, but it isn’t quite finished. We grabbed another speedlight, this time a 580EX II, and we put that behind the bin, zoomed out as wide as it could go (24mm & yes I know we could have put a diffuser on there to go wider & probably should have). We threw a blue gel on that flash and that brought our background to life a bit more with about 1/2 power coming out.. Done? Nope.. not yet.

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So one more light.. I think another 580EX II this time and we placed that in the bin. The 580EX II flash is FAR from rubbish, but to get a little bit of backlight on our gents around the bin required the flash getting down and dirty. We toyed around with additional flashes in different spots but we made our results with this setup.

How did you trigger the Elinchrom Ranger and the Canon Speedlights together? Good question. In previous times I would have had a 580EX II set to master mode in the hot-shoe of my trusty 5D MK II. That would act as the trigger for the other speedlight flashes. The Elinchrom Ranger kit has an optical slave built in, so I could have used this method to trigger all the lights. Well maybe not all. The flash in the bin, and the one behind the bin may be at risk of not firing. The built-in master/slave functionality of the Canon speedlights requires line of sight to operate. And they wont work in a chain fashion either. That is, each and every slave flash not on the camera, needs to be triggered directly from the flash in your hot-shoe.  (Pssst.. Apparently Nikons dont have that limitation). So how did I do it? Wireless radio triggers of course!

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Pocket Wizards are my usual go-to wireless trigger. They are the industry standard and they are pretty much 100% reliable. These days though, I am using the Yongnuo RF-602′s. I originally bought them months ago to test them out because they were so cheap ($120 for a transmitter and 4 receivers) and I was skeptical. I still am skeptical, I have a feeling they are going to let me down one day. All these months so far though they have never skipped a beat so we will see how we go.

So there you go, any questions?