Last week I shot a series of photos for the Appleton Police Department, in which they will be used for an upcoming officer recruitment campaign. Their needs were real specific. The main image (2nd one down) will be used in a 4 foot by 5 foot display in the lobby of the department. They wanted a “Band of Brothers” feel to the image. I was fairly insistent on lighting the officers in the shot, to give it a commercial appeal. The problem we ran into was lighting 9 cops spread across a 25 foot hilltop, without over-powering the mood of the scene.

The initial “safe” shot was a silhouette that loosely resembled the Band of Brothers look.

Next came the main image for display. I knew what I was after, but getting it right in-camera was the difficult part. Even tougher was that we used a single 28″ Wescott softbox to light the entire shot. With the help of Trevor and Rob, I ‘m fairly certain we nailed it.

How you ask? That’s for me to know..

Here are some more promotional one-off photos from the shoot. More on the way soon!

And of course, us, hard at work… (Photos courtesy of Rob Buettner)

~dave

ALICIA & CHAD
June 13th, 2009
Medina Wedding Chapel
Fox Banquets
Appleton, WI

Congratulations!
~dave

…from the seamless today.

Tobin’s getting more and more freckles.

And despite her fangs and what appears to be blood on her face, Zoee is NOT a vampire. This was post-cake.

~dave

A straight-forward corporate headshot session from today on a rather tight schedule, lasting only about 10 minutes. John came in with real specific guidelines from his company’s graphic designer, requiring the need to be able to switch out background colors/textures and the future placement of a company logo on his shirt. Once again, shooting on white seamless does the job!

~dave

I’m currently working on expanding my headshot portfolio for 2009 and decided to give my white seamless another test run before brining in clients later this week. This time around however, it was with Trevor and, well, Tobin & Zoee..

And lastly, these are my new additions to my slowly growing wine collection. Keith and I made the venture down to Milwaukee last week to meet Maynard James Keenan (of my long-time favorite band Tool) and Eric Glomski of Caduceus Cellars/Merkin Vineyards to get our hand on this wine. After standing in line for nearly 3 hours, we had the chance to meet them face-to-face and obtain some signatures on the bottles. Although we drank one that night, the rest of these babies are going hang around for a while and age!

Happy Tuesday!
~dave