Anchor Atlantic

August 1, 2011 Posted by Russ Robinson in Blog

Anchor Atlantic

Voted "Tampa Bay's Best Top 40 Cover Band" by FM radio behemoth 93.3 FLZ, Anchor Atlantic (http://anchoratlanticband.com) has built a solid reputation on keeping audiences rocking all night long.

This photo shoot took place at Kelby Studios in Oldsmar, FL in January 2011. My buddy Matt Kloskowski, a.k.a. "The Photoshop Guy" had recently featured one of my images in his book, entitled Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop's Most Powerful Feature (2nd Edition), and as a token of appreciation for letting me use the image, he offered to serve as my lighting assistant on this band promo shoot. Needless to say, having someone of his caliber and photography-world celebrity assisting ME seemed like quite an odd juxtaposition, but of course there was no way I was gonna pass up the opportunity to work with him. Sweetening the deal even further was the fact that German über Photoshop dude Calvin Hollywood happened to be in town that weekend shooting a video series for Kelby Training, and he and his assistant Gabor even helped me out with the lighting for one series of images. Cool stuff!

Below is a lighting setup shot that shows how I lit everything for pretty much the entire day. Two strip lights on the side for rim, and a large Elinchrom octa as key. I use this 3-light setup anytime I want a hi-def, HDR appearance, and/or I plan to composite the subject(s) into a different scene in Photoshop.

Lighting setup shot for Anchor Atlantic by Music Photographer Russ Robinson

Here's the first image we put into the client's hands. It was shot by me, but retouched by Matt Kloskowski.

And finally, here is the second image that was delivered to the client, several months later (the band had a lineup change, which was the reason for the extended delay). The individual band members were shot by Matt in the studio, and then I extracted them and created this composite.