Behind the Scenes - Night Running
Often when I’m driving I spend a lot of time brainstorming. Thinking about ideas, anything from business developments to marketing plans to photo ideas. Lots of these ideas are just passing and I might think about them for the duration of my drive and thats it, but others I’ll write down when I stop and come back to them. This particular idea was the latter.
Recently I’ve been exploring the concept of creating photographs and not just being present for moments. I wanted to shoot running, and wanted to create a series of images at night through a foggy forest. We lined up the team and found a night where all out schedules aligned.
We could have waited for the fog to be just right, but part of my plan was to control all the elements of the shoot, including the fog. To do this we brought a smoke machine and a generator to run it. The most complicated part of this shoot was managing the fog and getting it to disperse through the woods.
The lighting was fairly simple for each set up and only relied on two lights. One set with the high performance reflector was my backlight, and would illuminate the fog and backlight the entire forest. The other was the deep octa and was used to fill the shadows and the subject. This light was fairly low power and was positioned high above the camera.
Neither of these two lights were positioned in a good place for Guy to see when running, so I set up a third light, but only used the modelling light and set it to a different flash group so it wouldn’t fire and light the trail.
It was pretty quick to get the running to look the way I wanted, but took a bit longer to get the fog to be dispersed throughout the entire frame. I shot each frame on a tripod and shot various frames of the fog throughout the forest so I could combined them in post, but in the end was able to get frames where the fog covered the entire image. While this didn’t particularly matter to me, it did safe time on the post production, and I only needed to do a few small tweaks and final colour.
Athlete: Guy Fattal
Assistant: Shane Roy, Mitch Winton
Gear
Canon R5
Canon RF 24-105 F4
Canon EF 17-40 F4
Canon EF 100 F2.8
Elinchrom ELB 1200
Elinchrom ELB THREE
Elinchrom One
39 inch Elinchrom Deep Octa with grid
Elinchrom High Performance Reflector
Laptop and tripod with Capture One session
Smoke Machine
Generator
Leaf Blower