In this case I got called out to LA to shoot the launch of Dean Zelinsky's new guitar company (DBZ Guitars).
First, the hours. Up at 4:30 AM, a flight change in Las Vegas, in to Anaheim by 12:30 Dallas time. A quick stop at the hotel to dump off luggage (you can't check in to 3PM) and off to the convention center.
As much as concert lighting is a challenge to shoot under, it's nothing compared to a trade show floor. The lighting is god awful horrid. 50' up in the ceilings they have these monstrous halogens with this horrid color temperature that makes everything look pale, lifeless and flat. Whatever lighting they have in the booth doesn't really do much for the product, and there's no contrast to be had anywhere. It's rough making stuff look good.
Then there's the time factor.
I like to take my time (heh) working through concert shoots. The time from shoot to on the web at a trade show does not allow for jack diddly in terms of post shot cleanup. Time is of the essence.
Complicating this, is the lack of decent connectivity. Convention center WIFI's are a joke, and the Anaheim is amongst the worst. I had a 20 mb batch of JPEG's to get to DBZ Guitar's web guy for posting, and it took almost an hour and a half to load. We're talking dialup level throughput. As a result, you have to cut that out of post time, which means in reality, you MAYBE have 20-30 seconds to spend on a given shot. It's bare bones basics.
So the shoot worked pretty much as follows:
I'd crank out 30-50 shots, then drop the card into my firewire reader and pull them off onto the laptop drive. Those get batch imported into Aperture, then I'd spend maybe 5 minutes going through the shots and doing a rough cull.
After that, I'd pick 15-20 of those that were decent prospects, and spend 15-20 seconds doing very rough corrections, and once that was done I'd batch export for web res. I'd load the prospect JPEGS up in preview and run through those with the Dean and get a thumbs up/down.
The approvals then got zipped into a file, and emailed to the web guy, which would take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. While the email was cooking I'd head back out onto the show floor and start shooting again. Rinse and repeat all day long.
Announcement here:
Gallery Here:
Tomorrow I'll have a little more control over the shoot, in that I'll be able to get there before the crowds hit, and should have some time tomorrow night AFTER they close the show (and turn off those miserable damn ceiling fixtures) to try to get some decent glamour shots of the product.
Still, even though it's pure chaos, these events are a lot of fun, because I get to run into folks I don't get to see all the time. I bumped into Chad Lee (Rock Concert Fotos), who I haven't seen in a good year and a half. The last time Chad and I shared a pit was to shoot Dave Navarro, John 5, Jerry Cantrel, Mike Inez, Scott Ian, Zakk Wylde and a whole raft of other folks for a 2 day shoot, so it was a blast running into him.
I ran into one of my Luthier friends, Ben Chafin, who announced he'd purchased the Electra Guitar company, which is really cool for me, as my very first "decent" guitar as a kid was an Electra, and while they've been out of production for years now, they still have quite a cult following. Ben's going to resurrect the line, and modernize the concept they pioneered of sticking floor pedal into the actual guitar in the form of interchangeable plugin modules.
He built a couple prototypes he brought to the show, and I got to see that glorious peace sign logo on a headstock on a new guitar for the first time in over 30 years. Neat stuff.
There will be various "all star" events going on Friday and Saturday, so I should be able to catch some actual performance stuff as well.
Like a festival, you have to decide almost as much what you won't shoot as what you will, since they're spread all over town and you can't be everywhere at once.
At any rate, I'm off to bed. I'll try to get some pix up when I get a moment's break.
