Summer is cooking full heat in Tokyo so there's no better time to take your photography indoors for a change and get to sharpening some different skills.
It's been busy days!! But one major milestone finally achieved as this past week was the launch of the new Tekumi Studios project I've been working on for quite some time. To get the studio kickstarted myself and a friend and fellow photographer, Alan Jiménez Cruz, hosted 3 other photographers in the space to facilitate a 3 hour photo session using strobes, RGB's, LEDs and various props. We were fortunate to have the effortlessly cool Zeroco be our model for the day as you'll see in the photos. The goal? Experimentation in lights and colour mixing. I'm a huge fan of photographers like Polina Washington and Lindsey Adler who work both in and out of the studio creating entirely new universes with their creative use of light and colour so this was definitely inspired by them.
I'm posting photos from our setups using mainly RGB's for now as I haven't gotten to editing the flash photos (for another post or watch my Instagram ). As you can see in the photos above we were using a lot of teals, yellow-oranges and violets (a nice triad colour combination) testing different placements of lights. Lighting used in these shots include:
- Soonpho P20II RGB LED lightstick
- Pixel G1S RGB LED Video Light
But in no way do you need the expensive lighting we had here especially the Rotolights (thanks to Mike for bringing those by) and could just as well make do with some more of the Soonpho lightsticks which blast about 20W of power more than capable of filling up a space this size.
I was also using a Haida Blackmist Pro 1/8 to soften the images on my Sony A7III with a 50mm 1.2 GM (oh baby, do I love this lens!!) Throw in a fog machine and disco ball and the retro disco party theme is in full effect! I'm more than happy with what the final images turned out like but let me know what you think in the comments.
And if you're in the Tokyo area, join the Meetup group and a growing network of other creatives at Tekumi Tokyo Portrait and Street Photography We have a pretty vibrant LINE group chat where other photographers can share their work and it's a great chance to network and learn some new skills.
Working on the next Studio event which will hopefully be in 2 weeks so stay tuned and sign up early as space is limited!
Thanks always.
- d.