HOLAS Advertising, Catalogue and BTS images

Holas Beachwear is an awesome new men’s beachwear clothing line. I was given the opportunity of shooting their first adverts and their next adverts are on my creative desk to shoot in a couple weeks. Holas SS14 was entirely shot in one very long day. Their collection was basically broken down into 4 lines: St. Tropez, Sicily, Rio De Janeiro and Ibiza. The biggest challenge was shooting around 20 images in one day with multiple location changes during the day. So that meant making the most of each location and hope the weather would hold up by the end of the day. 

So for this shoot the location was crucial. I had to find a place that I could easily pull of for different location styles in one. After many phone calls, hours online researching and a day of driving around location scouting, I finally was granted authorizations to a great backdrop for part of the shoot at hand.

It was a great Hotel — Hotel Arribas — that not only had an Olympic sized swimming pool, but was also next to a gorgeous beach AKA Praia das Maçãs.

After guaranteeing my first location with authorizations and budgets, and after the client saw my location scouting images, he chose two other fairly close beaches where we could get a different type of rock formations along with a different look and feel for the images taken there. When I location scout I use an application called Sun seeker as it helps me plan the day’s shoot. It provides a flat view compass and an augmented reality camera 3-D view showing the solar path, its hour intervals, its winter and summer solstice paths, rise and set times and more and a map view showing solar direction for each daylight hour.

My gear for the day was pretty simple for the most part; I had a Profoto B1 pack with one strobe. Beauty dish was the only light modifier. I also used a 5 in 1 reflector and two scrim jims — 2×2 and 1.5 x 2 —  with silver, gold and scrim fabrics. I shot on the Hasselblad H3D 39 with a 28mm f/2.8 lens, an 80mm and 120mm Macro. I used a Canon 5D Mark III with a 70-200 f/2.8 and a 50mm f/1.2 for some of the action shots and magic hour images. I like to take advantage of my faster 35mm system, along with higher ISO possibilities.

I was also shooting using a 3 Legged Thing tripod whenever I could because the tripod helps give me extra sharpness. I can also usually create a better connection with my models when I am not hiding behind the camera and a tripod helps a lot with that. I almost always shoot directly to Sandisk Extreme Pro CF and SD cards. 64 and 128 GB.

Lighting setup for the main image (at the beginning of the post):

Some images were shot using just natural light and a Westcott Scrim Jim with a silver fabric as a reflector. Here’s an example with both the image and the lighting setup: