Seattle Photographer Lara Grauer – Setting Up The Shot

Here’s an on-location behind-the-scenes photo of Seattle Photographer Lara Grauer standing on a countertop, arranging items for a product shot. It was one of those moments that I just couldn’t pass up. Lara was standing on our client’s marble-topped kitchen island organizing roses, eggs, fancy napkins, and assorted ingredients for an overhead top-down shot.

The kitchen island was so large that standing on the ladder that I brought along to the shoot wasn’t going to cut it, so Lara got right up there and got to work.

I took this photo with my iPhone while holding far too much gear, without the right amount of light, so it has that somewhat out-of-focus and a little bit grainy look to it. I’m shooting on an iPhone 6s, which I would think should easily be able to produce enough resolution for my snapshots to look good on high-resolution “retina” screens. I need to dig into the settings to see if I can squeeze a little more quality out of my iPhone photos.

Or I could simply use this as an excuse to bring our backup camera along so that I can shoot all the Behind The Reflector shots in style. I’m sure Lara wouldn’t mind at all. The only drawback is that it’s more gear for me to carry.

And, of course, the obligatory selfie:

I’ve got my shoot-through umbrella and SB-800 Speedlight and Odin II trigger mounted to this neat little Westcott ProGrip Speedlite Mount, all mounted on my trusty extension pole.

I’ll mount this rig to the pole if I know ahead of time that I’ll be moving around a lot and I’ll need lots of flexibility when I’m positioning lights. Flexibility was especially important with this client since we were bouncing between shooting in the big, roomy kitchen, inside of bathrooms and even inside of closets and very enclosed spaces.