Bryan contacted me a few weeks ago to get some promo shots. He’s a bad-ass cellist from Toronto but is here in Montreal studying music performance in grad school at McGill. The photoshoot was simple enough, it just involved us walking around downtown, and me asking him to play at different locations. Lighting-wise, it was mostly natural lit.
On a few cases I took out a soft-box to give directional light and darken the whole scene. It’s an Apollo 28″ softbox, with a speedlight used almost at full power.
This next image on the left is one of my favorites. I love the colors, detail in the cello scroll (I did my research! Learned cello parts!), and the out of focus background (which was achieved with a large aperture, and choosing an angle where the background distance to Bryan was much larger than the distance between me and him).
We then randomly figured out somehow that he is my neighbor. I’m secretly hoping to get some free shows sometimes.
He also plays at weddings, so I could potentially run into him at a wedding I’m photographing. Otherwise, I’ll probably just run into him getting pizza at Amelio’s next door or something.
