I was asked to come along to a summer party and take some photographs. Rather than roaming among the guests with a DSLR, I wanted to do something more formal whilst still keeping with the spirit of the event. The Theme of the party was Festival and dressing-up costumes and props were available for guests to play with and have some fun. I set up a marquee in a corner of the garden next to a wall and put up a sheet for a background. Since I was shooting in both afternoon and evening I needed a powerful but soft pleasing light that covered the whole area evenly as I would be photographing groups of people. The Elinchrom 197mm Octabox would be perfect and I lit it using the Elinchrom Ranger Speed that would give me 1100 watts of power which was ample and would have a fast re-cycling time. The great thing about the octabox is it gives virtually equal exposure across a large area so no other fill lights were needed. It was a fun set up and I was able to grab people, bring them into the marquee and get them to choose some props or not and photograph them for a few minutes. Shooting with a Medium format camera and digital back gives you a great quality to the image.
I finished the shooting with this image of The Village Idiots, a local band with a fast growing reputation, who were playing a couple of sets at the party.
When the shoot was edited a montage of images were presented to the host as a large framed print.
I shot the image on a Phase One IQ140 Digital back on a Contax 645 camera with a Carl Zeiss 55mm/f3.5 lens. Images were processed in Phase One Capture One software.