Samara and the Falling Down Barn
A few months ago I was given permission to shoot at an acquaintance's barn. The owner said it was run down - something I might like. I decided to investigate. Overall, the property wasn't all that great. The barn looked old, but relatively uninteresting from the front. However, nearly the whole back side of the barn had collapsed.
Before heading home from my scouting trip, I decided to stick my 7D/17-55mm IS lens into a small portal in the door to see what the right section of the barn looked like. This is what I saw when I looked at my camera's LCD screen:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-A...0/IMG_0019.JPG
My mouth gaped open - I loved that scene. I immediately began brainstorming on how to use the unique space.
After a bit of thinking, I decided I wanted to do a creative, artistic shoot using the dilapidated location. After one model cancelled on me on two consecutive occasions, I reached out to Samara - a girl I had worked with a couple of other times - to see if she wanted to do this shoot. She happily and readily agreed.
When the shooting day arrived, things didn't necessarily go as planned. For one, the gate to the property was nailed shut. Even though we had permission to shoot at the location, we had to hop over the gate each time we wanted to get something from the car and hand the gear over the fence (which was quite a bit).
Remember that door I told you I poked the camera through to get the location shot? I never tried opening the door. I assumed we could open the door and be right where we needed to be. Unfortunately, the bottom of the door was buried into the ground. We tried to open the door (by digging with our hands and heels), but had no luck. After 15 minutes, we decided to see if there was another way into the location.
We walked around to the back of the barn and saw where the back side had collapsed. The small section on the right that we were interested in was walled off, so we couldn't simply walk into the middle of the open-air barn and over. Instead, there were just enough gaps in the fallen structure to finally reach our destination. This meant crawling on our hands and knees - below boards with dangers nails visible just above our heads - to reach our intended shooting location.
Once we get there, I asked Samara whether she thought it was worth bringing all the equipment to the spot. I told her we could find another section of the property to shoot. However, after seeing the location first-hand, Samara was confident that it was worth the effort and risk.
We made several trips hauling equipment to the shooting location. Once we were in place, I realized that scene I had witnessed months ago - with the sun streaming through the boards, wasn't a reality. The sky was very overcast and we had even seen some sprinkles while traveling to the shoot. I seriously considered placing two monolights on the outside of the barn, facing the wall, warm gelled, so that I could simulate evening sunlight coming through the structure. However, the threat of rain ultimately kept me from doing this. If it had started raining, it would have taken me about 3-4 minutes to reach my equipment. Monolights + battery packs + rain do not mix well. I decided I'd have to light everything from the inside instead. Not ideal, but a compromise I could live with.
For lighting, I boomed a Westcott RapidBox Octa between a couple of rafters above the model. I used an umbrella just off to camera right for fill light. I realized after a couple of test shots that I needed a fill light in order to get good detail in the background. This is where countless hours of studying lighting techniques becomes invaluable. I used a piece of paracord (that I keep in my bag for uses just like this) to hang a flash and umbrella above/behind the model. This way I could light the area with a soft light but still keep the light and modifier out of the frame.
Next, the lit the very back of the structure with a bare flash clamped to a board well behind the model. After getting all of that in place, we started shooting. During the shoot, I changed up camera settings and flash power just a bit to allow for more light to come through on the background.
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5531/1...11204de532.jpg http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2856/1...e55e93bb83.jpg
Setup shot:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7290/1...69e6f074_z.jpg
To see the entire series, click on one of the pictures above and check out the results on my Flickr photostream.