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One time when I was at Tennis camp my coach got really upset with me because I decided it was a good idea during our break to set a tennis ball on fire.

On that note, here’s a little promo video we shot for Stunglasses. It’s got some FIRE and SLOW MOTION! All that’s missing is an explosion and you can call me Michael Bay. We chose to light these on fire because these pair are called “Coal“.

A couple days before the shoot, Peter helped me build this little fancy looking gem made from left over skateboard trucks he had and some sweet pink wheels and bearings I got off ebay for a couple bucks. We went to Home Depot and picked up a metal plate for around $7. Drilled some holes in it and it came out looking pretty good.

We had to do this several times. The first time we did it, once we lit the fire it blew everything out and you could barely see the sunglasses at all. The second time we did it, the fire looked good, but you couldn’t see the logo at all. So bottom line was that we didn’t have enough light (2 work lights). We regrouped and used 4 work lights the third time around and it made a big difference. Here she is…I really hate how youtube doesn’t let me embed in HD when using a custom size. So if you want to see it not look crappy, change it to 720p before you watch it.

Did another little mini shoot for STUN Glasses, this time for an ad on another company’s website who caters to the Dubstep music community. We brain stormed ideas for props we could use relating to dubstep and most all of them involved speakers. So, we went with head phones since nice speakers are huge and we still wanted STUN to be center of attention.

We had a “You know when you’re getting old when…” moment when we had to look up some terms used in the Dubstep community. It turns out Dubsteppers like “dirty” things, including “Slimey” things, which turns out to fit perfectly with the green pair of STUNs called Slime. Man, I’m lame. I might as well have said “Look it up on THE google; this dub stepping thing.”

THE SETUP

This was shot using a work light, like the ones you would get at Home Depot for 30 bucks. You just have to be sure you set the White Balance to something relatively low otherwise it would be crazy yellow. We then used a snoot on the work lamp made out of poster board to focus the light preventing it from hitting the black background. We noticed the “STUN” logo was dark in the first photo and we wanted to make it pop. So, knowing we could merge a light photo and a dark photo in post processing, we shot 2 of the same photos, one with and another without a white reflector.

Here she is, pre-production, without reflector:

Here she is, pre-production, with reflector (notice the highlights coming from the left):

And, the final, after post-production:

One of my best buddies, Peter, (and groomsmen; only 3 months until Wedding Day!) started a classic wayfarer style sunglasses company called STUN Glasses with another buddy of mine, Ryan. They wanted to feature a photo of one of the sunglasses with a New Years theme. I took it as an opportunity to practice some product photography and the results ended up being pretty good. At least we thought so. This was the final shot we chose after hours of Chrissy and Peter throwing confetti in various methods.

Here is the edited version used on the site.

We used a home made DIY light box made with 12 pieces of wood and white fabric. For the ground, we followed Zack Arias’ lead from his CreativeLiVE workshop and went to Home Depot to buy the white panel board which gives that subtle reflection for only $12. We only used one on-camera flash for this shot. Which was surprisingly enough. I brought a lot more gear but didn’t end up using most of it. I thought for sure at least we would use the flash off-camera, but I think the lightbox did the trick for us, evenly distirbuting the light. I wish I had taken some behind the scenes photos, but I didn’t this time and will next time since we’ll be doing more.

We also took a bunch of regular product shots with blown out white and black backgrounds, but those are kind of boring so I won’t post them. They look good, but just imagine sunglasses set against plain backgrounds and you’ll have your picture.

UPDATE: We had some time to mess around so we took photos of eachother trying our best “Blue Steel” looks. So here are a couple of Peter and me. If you’re interested, I’m wearing COAL and Peter is wearing SLIME. They’re real sick sunglasses, so get a pair. Or don’t, but it won’t be my fault if you step out into the sunlight and your eyeballs melt because you didn’t listen to me!