Ottawa Fringe Festival

This is the kind of project I want to do more of. I had such a great time photographing the Ottawa Fringe team for their commerorative book, the first time they’ve done such a project. The producer at the Ottawa Fringe, Natalie, was introduced to me by showing up at my house one Photojam long ago. We had since become friends, but I like to think that I Was brought onto this job for my skillset in commercial photography, the composite images, as a by-product of my Stay-At-Home-Dad series – The fringe has no shortage of talent available to it.

This was the largest composite I have worked on, by volume of people, the project called for 18, though only 15 were available that day (which is fine, because the more people, the more work!). This was shot, specifically, for a double-page spread, thus the generous margin at the centre of the image. The only goal here was to fit everyone in, in a dynamic situation (the theatre) and, ultimately, have fun. Everyone who came that day was so great, despite some of the staff not knowing WHAT the final image was supposed to be (or even why they were there) they went to their individual shooting marks without hastle.

It’s a challenge for them, I’m sure, to try and conceptualize what is only in my brain, what will only be a final product after a week of sleepless nights, and hand cramping on my Wacom Intuos Tablet
pen from masking and gripping and photoshop photoshop photoshop. I did have a sketch out that we did on a notebook beforehand, just to see what a merged image would look like in final.

Once again I couldn’t have done the work without assistant/photographer Brennan Schnell, who held the lights, brought a few of his own (I think we used 6-8 speedlights in this scene?), and only once questioned my authority 😉

I do recommend you go check this out larger on Flickr, the native image is 9854 pixels wide, which is about 40″ wide at 250ppi, but I’ll spare you THAT much detail. And even better is watching a short timelapse of (most of) the shoot:

It’s even available in 1080p for the adventurous! (thank you Sean)

You can buy the Ottawa Fringe Festival: Off the Record, 15 years of the Ottawa Fringe Festival on their website here, even if it is for my two page spread.

Posted on Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 12:01 am. Filed under: Portraits Tags: Commercial_Photography, Composite, Fringe_Festival, Ottawa, Portraits, Strobist RSS 2.0 feed.