Tarus Lifestyle Photoshoot

I met Tarus a few month ago at his barber shop. He wanted to get some stylized photos for himself to promote his business. We had an awesome session with him posing around the barber shop and also in front of one of my dark grey backgrounds. This was our second shoot together and instead of being in his business location, we took it outside to get some unique shots around Old Sacramento. 

Tarus has a vision of what he wants when it comes to the imagery he wants to produce. I love that about him because working with a creative is so much fun. He's definitely down to go outside the box when it comes to the photography we come up with. Tarus is also willing to take risks in terms of getting that perfect shot. In the photo above, Tarus sat on a wooden post directly above a steep drop into the Sacramento River. One wrong move... and SPLASH. It's a good thing we didn't have any incidents here.

Tarus and I also spent some time dropping this shaver from an elevated location. We were able to get several shots of the drop and him catching it. I like this one the most because the shaver is nice and large in the frame. A smaller aperture may have been better to get Tarus more in focus, but as is I'm happy with this result. The a9 really helped get us a bunch of useable images from this portion of the shoot. I set it for a very high frame rate and it tracked the motion extremely well.

Never unprepared, Tarus came with a variety of outfits to shoot in. He had a black and red motif, an all black look, and this flashy gold jacket. I loved this jacket as it made the photos with him in it really pop. I pulled out a flash to keep up with his flashy gold jacket. It was really fun as a photographer to use the flash in a lot of different ways. In the pic above I'm shooting right at the flash. The smaller aperture I'm using makes the flash display a star pattern and we get some JJ Abrams-esque lens flare going on!

Here's a pic of the flash let off to the side. It allowed me to get some very nice and bold colors off of Tarus. I use Flashpoint flash units for my lighting. I really like them because they are extremely affordable and work really well. I typically like to go native when paring up my camera gear, but I think the price of native flashes is really unjustified compared to these third party ones.

It was incredible to shoot with Tarus and I'll actually be off to Oakland tomorrow to attend a barber expo tomorrow. Look for images from that to come soon!