» shutter speed Photography by Brent Michael

Massage anyone?

11 02 2009

Okay, on to work things I’ve been working on. One of my latest projects has been helping a local masseuse develop her business. She’s recently located in Salon Osiria, a New Tampa salon that offers full-service hair, facial, manicure, and body services. Joyce offers Ashiatsu, Esalen, Sports, Swedish, and Deep Tissue massage, as well as Trigger Point Therapy.

: Guys enjoy it when she walks all over them!

One challenge photographically was maintaining a sense of the room’s atmosphere while properly lighting Joyce so people could see her face. The room is not large so there was no way to use multiple studio lights without them getting in the way, so I used just a single flash with, of course, Gary Fong’s Lightsphere II diffuser. The flash power was cut way down, and the shutter speed was very slow to let lots of room light in. It helps to have a fast lens; this one is Canon’s 16-35mm f2.8 L on a 5D, the full-frame sensor eliminating the 1.6x crop factor of the typical APS-C cameras like the Rebel or 10/20/30/40/50D series. That means 16mm gives it the equivalent field of view of a 10mm on the smaller sensors. It also allows me to use a wide aperture while still keeping decent depth of field in the shot, I wasn’t looking for bokeh here.

Naturally, I took a wide variety of both landscape and portrait mode shots, since we weren’t sure what would be used for what. Later I returned to take shots of standard massage and chair massage as well.