Yokohl Valley Shoot: Behind the Scene

This was a fun project my friend Johnny Lopez asked me to ba a part of. We had access to 3 GoPro video cameras and 2 video cameras, one of which was a Red Camera. Phet Khamsaysoury from UC MEDIA was there and Scotty Shewman of Sky Eye. Scotty mounted one of the GoPros on his radio controlled helicopter and shot all the aerials. We shot the project in Yokohl Valley a beautiful area here in Central California, the model was Haley Pereira and my friend Jon Mason assisted on the shoot and was the motorcycle rider. This was my first try at editing video and I decided to try Apples' Final Cut X and I created the music on Apples' GarageBand. I had a total blast learning and using Final Cut X and 3 days later I created this little video of behind the scene of a typical shoot.

Model and the snake part 2

On this shot Bree switched to her new snake that she rescued from the animal shelter. I was surprised how the snake was so comfortable under the studio lights in a whole new environment. I even went up and touched the snake and let him coil around my arm a little and I’m not a big snake fan. This happened to be Bree’s favorite shot on this series, basically everything was set up the same way as the photo in the first post. Usually it’s a no no to show too much of the whites of the eyes but I thought her eyes, look and looking off to the side added to the mysterious feel of the image.

Model and the snake part 1

This was a experimental model shoot I did in late December with Bree and her pet snakes. I had never really worked with animals before on a shoot, especially snakes! Not knowing what to expect from the snakes, they behaved perfectly and the flash from the studio strobes did not seem to bother them. Also on this shoot I was working with Marielle, the makeup artist and also does hair. She did a stellar job, she matched the lip stick to Bree's hair color and the rest of the makeup was just perfect. The shot was done with a Nikon D200 with a Nikkor 60mm micro lens, a couple of Photogenic studio strobes and a Westcott tri-flector, which was positioned just under her arms. Normally I would warm up the skin tones on a fair skinned model but I didn't care what id did to the over all image and since snakes are cold blooded I left the image as shot with her skin looking a little pale.