Calvillo Girls

My friends the Calvillo Girls are not only fantastic, amazing (like stupid good) singers but also beautiful young girls. They recently signed a record deal with Red Zone Entertainment and I wanted to get on their radar. So I asked them if they would be willing to do a shoot with me.

Check out this behind the scenes video. A special Thanks to my Friend Daniel Rocha for putting this video together for me!

Calvillo Girls Shoot from Luke Pickerill on Vimeo.

I went to their house for a pre-production meeting, I wanted to get a better sense of the girls personalities and it didn't take long for me to figure out exactly what we were going to do. I planned on doing two setups.
1. All white environment.
2. A Gray background for compositing later.

The setups for both shots were very similar. For the Gray backdrop I set up a nine foot seamless grey paper. I used a Alien Bees B1600 for my key light camera right with a giant softbox. I used two B1600's gridded with 1/2 cuts of CTO as rim lights. I set up another B1600 over the girls head with a stripbox to light the background. I wanted this to be really contrasty so I didn't use a fill here. In fact I placed a 7 foot piece of black foam core just out of frame to the left to stop the key light from bouncing off the wall back into the frame.

We were in a really small room. These are the best productions shot I have, you can kind of see whats going on...

For the final composite I took an image of some clouds I had taken on a recent trip to Bend, Oregon. Here is the final Image: My camera settings for this shot: f/11 - 1/200 - ISO200

f/11 - 1/200 - ISO200

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For the next setup I took down the Gray and replaced it with a nine foot seamless white. Now, I really wanted to lay some large sheets of plexi on the ground (to throw a little reflection up) for the girls to stand on but I couldn't fit them into my car so I made the decision before hand I would have to do it in post. Not my favorite option when shooting, I like to do as much in camera as possible but sometimes (especially with $0.00 budget you gotta do what you gotta do).
 
Key Light:
One I had the backdrop in place I left my Key light almost exactly where it was Just over camera left. I had originally wanted to reposition it to the other side of the room but the day was getting late and I didn't want to loose the energy of the girls by having them sit around for a long time. Since I already knew the correct f-stop I started on my background.

Background:

when shooting in an all white environment you want your backdrop to be 1 to 1.5 stops brighter than your key.  I started by setting up two 7 foot pieces of foam core scored down the middle and forming a 90° angle standing straight up on either side of the girls. I set a B1600 inside each of these. I set my light inside here to avoid spill onto my subjects. You can see them from the image to the right! I used the black side because when I flipped them around to the white side I was getting a lot of fill on the girl on the left while not getting very much on the girl on the right. So I used the black side and brought in a fill light just behind camera on the left.

My camera settings for this shot were f/13 - 1/200 - ISO200
Here is a couple of the final images:

 f/13 - 1/200 - ISO200

 f/13 - 1/200 - ISO200

f/13 - 1/200 - ISO200