BTS With Dani

While many of our friends were tuning their high-power optics to the Great Sun Eclipse of 2012, your truly was busy shooting another model :-)
I took a few BTS/setup frames, so I thought I'd share...

#1: As it has been said many times by many people (including myself, on more than one occasion), you can turn any purely black (not white!) BG into any color you want by training some gelled lights onto it.
I have two gel packs from Alien Bees. They cost only like $20 each. By mixing them I can produce virtually any color imaginable.
Since Dani was sporting a pair of beautiful blue eyes (complete with long blond hair and pale white skin), we started with royal blue:

#2: Remember, it was blue? Not anymore (and you can see it just black up front:-)

#3: Usually I don't allow male escorts, especially boyfriends.
Not that the guys would interfere. They very rarely do.
In fact, in my entire history I had just one case of such interference.
Granted, that BF came uninvited (and hence unvetted by me) with a second model, who came with the primary one on an extremely short notice.
I was kinda put on a spot, and since they came a long way I didn't have a heart to tell him off. I wish I did: the shoot was pretty much ruined...:-(
Few other cases when I ended up having a BF on set, they'd just sit quietly in a corner and would read a book or surf the net on his laptop.
Most just follow their GFs the same way they would follow them shoes or dress shopping.
They'd really prefer to do something else and to be somewhere else, but they had no choice :-).

So it's not the BFs themselves, per se.
It is the models that behave differently in their presence.
Most just can't tune BFs out. Meaning me and my camera get less attention than we need.

After being exposed to this behavior a few times I made it a very strict rule (see above:-)

But yesterday outdoors part of the shoot was a different story.
I had some extra gear to carry. Besides, I was expecting more company on that rocky outcrop due to the eclipse anyway, and I was right - there were a couple of Nikon shooters there.
Moreover, I have already "broken in" my model during the studio part (where he was not allowed), and in the outdoors attention game is different anyway, so we ended up having BF to tag alone for the sunset.

Every time I end up having escorts (male or female) on my set I try to use them whenever possible (free assistants, yay!)

Voice-Activated Self-Propelling Human-Shaped Scrim Holder:

#4: If you stare at this image for 5 min or more you may notice a guy (camera left) holding a golden reflector:

#5: As I said I had some extra gear on this outing.
Namely, two my old trusted 10' light stands (one of my very first studio gear purchases almost 10 years ago), 2 brand new Speedlites 600EX-RT and, last but not least, "commander" unit ST-E3-RT. All radio, purchased along with my first 5D3 from the good people of Tallyn's.
While I found speedlights to be less powerful than my old "potato-masher" Sunpacks (sunpacks use 6xAA, speedlites 4xAA) and taking a longer time to recycle at full power, the convenience of having HSS (high speed syncing) and ability to control the power from the commander unit, i.e. without constantly running to the flash units and back is definitely a winner. And the nice gel holders are awesome addition!

Two CTO-gelled speedlights in rim configuration:

Enjoy!