Finally as promised the blog post you have all been waiting for: “How I shoot the Deads“.
A couple of months ago a UK based prop shop asked me to take model pictures, aka polaroids, for the talent agency/prop shop catalogue.
The House of Deads is a prop shop/production house extraordinaire, specializing in taxidermy and also housing some other interesting little curiosities.
The task was simple…to make God’s little creatures look there best ever, even better then when they were alive.
The equipment I used was my camera of choice the Hasselblad H4D 40 with the standard 80 mm 2.8 and one light source. To be honest, I was not expecting to have to shoot the little guys for this client, it all kinda happened last minute so I was forced to use what I had with me. So with that being said, it was time to “POP UP MY FLASH”.
Yes, you read that correctly I said “pop up my flash”. Interesting little feature many people seem to laugh and giggle about, but all the images shown here were shot only with the pop up flash. Since I was not very prepared for this shoot, I did not have a proper seamless white backdrop either so I used the next best thing, an 100% white cotton bed sheet. I almost always shoot to a Sandisk Extreme Pro CF card , I prefer the mobiltiy of shooting to a card .
The diagram below shows the set up, but note, this diagram looks way better than my actual set up did…
My portrait shot by my buddy Bernardo Borges , you can see the PoP up Flash on the H4D
