Greene Family Music Christmas Card

I met a fellow colleague of mine Rob Greene shooting in the pit of a concert a few years ago. He's a jack of all trades doing both concert photography and promotion for local venues. He's helped me with access to local shows of acts I was interested in shooting and we've rubbed elbows in the pits of other shows as photographers more than once. He's a super nice guy and way into music than I will ever be.

Late last year he hit me up with a personal project of his that I could not refuse, to shoot his family's Christmas card. Now, this isn't something I normally lean toward, but Rob and his family aren't your normal family and they don't send out your normal Christmas card, because they are all big into music, they have started a tradition of basing their card off of classic album covers - how could I not jump on this?

Last year they based the card off of the Queen II album.

This year, they wanted one based off a Pretenders album.

Rob sent me the album image and it seemed pretty straight forward. Because it has a nice clean - white background, all we really needed to do is find a white wall and I could focus on the lighting while they focused on the wardrobe.

We bounced back and forth via email about a possible location. Since it was November, outdoor locations were not a good idea. When I told him all that I really needed, he came up with the local arts center in Clemson. We could do it one Sunday morning when it was not in use and it was right up the road from them.

So we arrived and I set up my stuff. I used three flashes for this setup. Two would be blasting the white cinderblock wall and one would be in my Paul C Buff PLM umbrella with diffusion fabric to light the subjects.

Dialing in the lights didn't take too long. I just needed a field behind them blown out. It didn't even need to fill the entire frame, just behind them to make editing really easy. I had to make sure they were the proper distance away from the wall because you can create a lot of reflective spill from the wall that you may not want. Since we were trying to reproduce a specific image that had no rim lighting, that took a little adjusting but it could mostly be done by increasing the distance between Rob and his family and the wall.

Here are a few test shots showing how it was dialed in.

Here you can see Rob (not so enthusiastically) posting for tests. There's a lot of light wrapping around the edges of his jacket. On the outer edges, you can see how the whole wall is not blown out, but around him, it's exactly how I wanted it.

Moving the background strobes a little and having Rob move forward (toward camera and away from the wall) reduced the amount of light hitting him from the wall.

Now we were ready to shoot. Rob's family were totally cool with what we were doing and everyone had done just enough to their wardrobe to convincingly imitate the Pretenders (pretending to be the Pretenders - why couldn't I think of that on set).

The only real challenge left was to set everyone just so to try to reproduce the original image: positions, body language expressions. We got seriously close right away and it just came down to chimping on the camera and comparing it with the original album image to make ever-so-slight tweaks. It happened scary-fast. So fast, just for insurance sake, I shot individuals in their respective poses just in case I felt the need to put this together as a composite image. But they nailed it so close in the last group shot, I never felt the need to go the composite route.

All I had to do is burn the corners in Lightroom to provide a clean canvas. Rob added the family name in the same font for the final result.

It all went so smoothly, I suggested some non-Pretender shots for their own use.

The great thing about a setup like this is that once you get the lights set up, it's very efficient. You can just shoot and shoot working on fine details and variety which is what studio-type setups are all about.