Here is the latest photo shoot that I did for Walmart Soundcheck featuring Latino mega stars Los Temerarios. The band began back in the 90’s and have sold over 45 million albums worldwide. They have hit the Miami music scene in recent years, and tour worldwide to sell out stadium crowds. I got the call from Los Angeles to do the shoot right here in Memphis at the historic Tennessee Brewery, where they shot a series of 7 music videos, interviews for Walmart Soundcheck, and the portrait session of the artists who are brothers, Adolfo Angel and Gustavo Angel. I had a blast shooting the music video stills, and then later in the day shooting their portraits for the website and branding photos. Be sure to visit soundcheck.walmart.com/los-temerarios to view the still photos that I shot for the project. (You’ll also get to see me in action on one of the music videos where the director used my photo shoot for one of the scenes!)

For the still photographs, I used both my Canon 5d Mark II, and an original Canon 5d with a wide array of lenses from the 15mm f2.8 fisheye, the 70-200mm f2.8 IS lens, and the Canon 50mm f1.2. All of the live music scenes were shot with available light from the video setup, with ISO ranges from 800 to 1600.  For the portrait session, I originally set up a 4×6 California Sunbounce reflector to accent the available light in the warehouse, but late timing and quickly fading daylight moved me into another room where I changed the lighting altogether. I simplified the shoot using 2 Canon 580 speed lights mounted on stands off camera to the right of the subjects. One speed light used a Gary Fong diffuser to offer a soft box effect, and the other flash was aimed straight on with no diffusion, both stands mounted low to cast a direct light across their faces. Using off camera flash triggers, I set the side flash to a manual setting of 1/8 of a second, at about 15 feet away to give me a nice hard light, as well as light the background wall. The other flash acted as a fill light to soften the light, and give me some key lighting on their faces. I used the Canon 24-105 mm IS lens for the indoor shots. I then moved them outside and simply used a Canon 50mm 1.2 L prime lens, found the last light of the day and placed them directly in the sun, letting the buildings bounce the sun around them as a backlight. The portrait session was changed to just under 10 minutes, so I had to be right on target with my lighting plan, and I had to make the last minute location change on top of all that. Finding just the right light and being creative at the very last minute was the key to this segment of the shoot.

Here’s a screen shot from Soundcheck’s home page featuring the shoot.