Photo Assignment : Bird Rock Surf

Here's a Gallery of images shot last Friday for a piece by Alyssa Ramos in the La Jolla Village News. To see the images full size in full screen mode, click on the second to last icon on the bottom right of the viewer (it looks like a square with a line coming out the top). Hit the ESC key to return to normal mode.


The two brothers (Matt & Ben Murphy) own the shop. Pat is the store manager and Cooper the dog is the store mascot.

I spent waaay more time than anticipated on this job. I was hoping to be in-and-out in twenty minutes but it took over an hour. First my WEIN IR remotes started acting up. Then my Lumedyne batteries died (they are old - a friend who was clearing out old equipment from storage gave them to me). I had charged them a few times and tested them around the house and outside over the last week or two. But lo and behold, when it came time to use them on an actual job - the buggers failed big time on me. In any case, I had to switch to hard-wired hot shoe flashes mounted on stands.

You can tell from the first two shots that the background strobe is gelled (3x LBs). The key light is a bare (unmodified) Canon 580EXII zoomed in to about 70mm at 1/16 power just out of camera right - about 36in from Matt's head.

I used a small Photoflex dome to light the group for some of the long shots. The store is huge and I had hoped to use two Lumedyne classic heads to provide some more interesting lighting. That was before the #!$&&#!! batteries died! The building was built to be a bank and that is how it spent the first few years of it's life. More recently it was an electric car rental shop - now Matt and Ben have it.

There is one room with a 25ft vaulted ceiling and nice wood finish. The middle two shots were an attempt to show the scale of the place by shooting the three guys and the dog in the big room and showing the rest of the store in the background.

Enjoy.