San Francisco Video Production and Still Photography company Corduroy Media recently had the awesome opportunity of producing a commercial photography shoot for O'Lover Hats, based in Oakland, California. Elwyn Crawford, the founder of the company, is preparing a line for Goorin Brothers Hat Shop and needed some images for the new line. After talking with Elwyn we came up with the following verbs: Urban, bold, graphic, styled. Oakland is such a diverse, creative place and truly experiencing an urban renaissance (hey, The New York Times ranked Oakland as the #5 place to visit in 2012) and we wanted to use an industrial setting as our location to shoot. We found a great area near Jack London Square to shoot and used SF Casting to find our models. We went with Yulia Zakomornya, who was with us on our Visa shoot last winter, and Chaize McKenney for our male model. Both were great to work with!
Our first setup is below- I used a ring flash as our key light, up high and pointed down, an octa box at 1/4 ratio for fill, another octa box at 1/2 power for an edge, and hard light with a flag to get the sharp shadow on the wall. It's always risky to use a hard light as the key light source, but I wanted our look to be punchy and have some grit to it. I also love the ability a hard light source has to create shadows and shape light. I just always make sure to fill in those shadows with a soft light source and use powder to keep skin looking nice.
We then moved across the street. I knew from our scout the shadows from the power lines above would be creating some great graphic elements for us to work with and moved our models in full sun. I used the sun as our key and filled in the harsh shadows with the always dependable ring flash.
Finally, we did some singles with Yulia- I used flags to create a slit of light. I am always inspired by the interesting shafts of light created by freeway overpasses on my bike rides around town and wanted to recreate the feel with this shot.
All in all, we had a great day working with our models and Elwyn. From creating a concept, scouting, to shooting on-location and working in post-we had a blast.
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