Photographer Mike Palmer was in town...

My friend (fellow photographer and blogger) Mike Palmer was in Maine on vacation with his family all of last week.

While he was here Mike asked if I would do a family portrait for him. I really hate taking pictures for friends, what if they hate it? And to make it worse, a friend who is a photographer, they'll surely find out I really suck!

Mike gave me just two bits of instruction, he wanted the portrait to be done in front of a brick wall, and he wanted it "edgy". I would consider myself a "traditional" kinda photographer, so "edgy" was taking me a bit out of my comfort zone.

So I took him to main street here in Biddeford and shot in front of one of the (many) old factory buildings.

I used 4 Nikon SB800's, two sitting on the street, one held on a boom with a snoot (similar to this) to make it look like they were standing under a streetlight (even though it was broad daylight), and the final flash was in Mike's back pocket pointing towards the brick wall (to give some depth to the image and separation from the wall).

So there was the Palmer family, my lighting setup (two of which were actually in the street), and my two to "VAL's" (voice activated light stands - AKA assistants) on one side of main street and me shooting from the other side, you can just imagine how traffic slowed down to "rubber neck".

It was fun, Mike was very happy with the results (or because he is a good friend he lied to me), and I was happy to have been taken out of my comfort zone to shoot something different.

The shot above was a "practice shot" to check the lighting (my wife thought it looked like and album cover).