I spent last weekend in a sound room/studio that I designed and put together years ago. I used to do sound work all the time, but not so much anymore — Still love it and get asked for help or answer questions on occasion, but I haven’t spent more than a few minutes behind a mixer in several years. Last Friday and Saturday I did and quickly remembered how much fun it is. During a lunch break though, I had a few minutes to take this shot, one I’ve had on my list for almost a year. This shot is of a Mackie sound mixer, one of my favorite boards. I’m not sure when I fell in love with Mackie products, but at some point I did and since then it’s the only brand I’ll happily recommend. Sure, there are other good brands, but there is just something about these boards I really, really like. I recommend them, cause if I ever end up at your venue or studio to help you, I want to run a Mackie. The brand doesn’t matter so much for this shot, in fact, their logo is in about the worst place (photographically speaking) you could put it.
For Photogs out there
I only had my camera backpack with me which just has a few essentials (7D, XSI, 35mm Body, 70-200mm/f4, 50m/f1.8, 10-24mm, 17-55mm, 430exII) — my lighting kit was a few miles across town and my tripod was out in my truck – I only had five minutes. I took a couple test shots at 50mm/f2.8 to get the angle and at a way to high iso I got a warm area in the shot from the goose-neck lamp. I pulled out the one flash I did have, the 430exII, and held it camera left. This blew away what little ambient & warmth I had so I had chose to gel the flash. Actually I needed warmth on the back of the board where the goose-neck lamp is, while maintaining natural color on the foreground faders. With one flash and zero ambient, I had little options. So I pulled out the gels, turned the flash head vertical and put a red gel on top to cover the background. Wasn’t quite the color mix I was going for so I added a CTB gel on the bottom, with a bit of overlap. With this I was able to get the deep color I was looking for and after a couple shots got the flash in the right spot (everything was handheld btw). I had about three minutes in this from start to finish before the folks started coming back for the afternoon session.
