Anyways, we’ve been driving all across Belgium, down to Paris, and back up through Metz and then to Berlin, to Prague (where we had our accident) and now in Bratislava Slovaika! Here’s more or less what the itinerary looked like:

The last few days have been absolutely amazing. After the abandoned buildings, we got the chance to go to a falcon camp where we shot a pretty exciting mix of magnificent eagles, falcons and vultures (courtesy of Valkerij Ardanwen). It was a gorgeous day out, and we had the opportunity to really just capture all sorts of different angles of the birds in flight! We got some particularly interesting footage by placing the GoPro right next to to the frozen chicks that they were being fed.

From there, we went to the retouching studio over in Antwerp and did an interview of our very first subject Chester Van Bommel.. followed by a late night drive over to Hasselt where Stjin, a photography fan took us in for the night at 4:30 AM. 3 hours later, we were up and running again to give a quick presentation to the folks studying photography over at CVHO – we gave an overview of my work, the project, videos, photos as well as the gear we used. I’m going to guess the presentation was quite decent since people stayed an hour later until the end of my presentation!

From there, we packed up and headed off to the Putrock festival to shoot some live footage of an up and coming Belgium band by the name of SX. If you haven’t heard of them ,check out their hit single Black Video… it’s quite catchy!

Parallel to the shoots, we were attempting to piece together a shoot with Iya Traore over in Paris but unfortunately he stopped answering our calls and messages… regardless, we headed off to Paris anyways to prep for the free workshop that we will be offering to those who have contributed to the project as well as finalize a couple artists that we were going to be covering. Additionally, we took the time to shoot a couple quick videos in a studio graciously provided to us by Byclown Photography. Unfortunately since our accident… that video’s also going to have to wait a while

One day later, we were back on the road towards Metz for a quick nap and transition so that we could make our way to Berlin the next day to prepare for a workshop hosted by Mateusz from The Workshop Factory. We arrived to Berlin around 11 PM late that night and took the time to do a quick rundown of how things were going to work with Mateusz who had provided us with a couple absolutely fantastic location to shoot with over the next two days. The workshop was quite small so things went quite smoothly.

Before we knew it though, we had to leave without even having the chance to see a part of Berlin and we were off to Prague. We had reserved a nice hotel for the first time of our trip at a steal (50 euros) but unfortunately things didn’t quite turn out as planned. We somehow managed to get ourselves onto a brand new highway that wasn’t yet open (thank you warning signs in Czech!). Things were going great for a good two minutes until the highway abruptly ended in a wall of safety pylons separating us from oncoming traffic. we managed to avoid hitting any cars but had no choice but to plow through the pylons which resulted in a smashed windshield, flat tire, destroyed side mirrors and most importantly… broken laptop.

From there the Czech police came by asking us for a bribe which we gracefully declined multiple times over the course of an hour and a half… By the time they had finished the police report, we had to wait another 40 minutes before the tow truck came… Being without internet or a cell phone line, we strategically asked to be dropped off at the Prague Airport which was 40 minutes away. 200 Euros later, we deposited our mangled car over at the airport as if we were casually returning a rental! It was quite funny to see the caretakers expression as he filled up that little blue form where you mark down the vehicle condition.

By then it was approximately 4 AM and we went hunting for a wifi connection and ended up camping on the floor right outside a closed Starbucks. From there it was one call after another to Avis Europe, Avis Belgium and Avis France and TD Canada Trust Visa to figure out what the next step was…

By 5 AM we had exhausted all internet resources and figured we deserved a good night’s sleep so we checked into the Mariott and negotiated a 50% discount. Erwan and I agreed that I’d take care of all the car stuff while he rested so that he could complete the drive from Prague to Bratislava!

8 AM – I was awake and at the Avis Prague counter asking for a new vehicle. The man told me to get some rest and he’d make the calls. Erwan slept on…
10 AM – I was back in front of the counter, things were finally sorted and we had our replacement vehicle ready to go so I took the time to transfer everything from our old Opal to our brand new Nissan. I went to pick up some breakfast and brought it back to the room. Erwan slept on…
1 AM – We both finally woke up and got ready to continue our journey…. making it right on time 10 minutes before a ballet presentation of the National Slovakian Ballet.

So all things considered? Despite a solid 10 hour delay our itinerary was hardly touched and we’re trucking on!!

Tomorrow, our shoot begins at 9 AM in the city square. Sorry guys but … time to crash now. More news soon and sorry for not being more up to date!!

Hey guys! So it’s been about three days since we’ve hit Europe and so far we’ve broken into two buildings and shot some eagles… (see some photos on my facebook fan page!)things have been quite wild and we’ve had about 10 hours of driving in the last two days so we’re quite exhausted!! I actually can’t write much more because we’re about 4 hours behind schedule thanks to two highway accidents and currently engaged in an interview with Chester Van Bommel!

That being said I did want to take a couple moments to give you guys some quick details on a workshop that we will be offering in collaboration with The Workshop Factory over in Berlin, Germany! We’re super excited because he’s been extremely hard at work putting together a great pool of talent for us to work with including the Pataman gym time guys who are a bunch of stuntmen that will re-enact a fight scene! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edxt9bE0iCc&feature=plcp and are currently finalizing details on the second day of shooting which would involve a mix of fashion and dance.

In one of the concepts, I have been challenged to use the Pataman Gym guys to create a fight scene where two fighters would be fighting in the centre of a scene surrounded by people tossing money at them while smoking cigars and drinking cocktails so that’s what I will do – from concept building, setup to photoshop.

And for a sneak preview of the second… here is one of the dancers and model…

We have CONFIRMED location rentals in these buildings which are absolutely amazing including an empty swimming pool!!

The workshop is limited to a MAXIMUM of ten people and all the money goes into the organizing of the whole thing… so be sure to reserve quickly!

So without further ado, here is the official poster of the event!

For more information, contact:
info@workshop-factory.de
Tel: 0176 636 30 668

Action Shoot

Mit 2 Kampfkünstlern und mehreren Statisten erstellen wir eine Komplexe Kampfszene.
Jeder Teilnehmer bekommt die Gelegenheit selbst zu *shooten und Anweisungen zu geben.

Was vermittelt der Referent?

Persönliche Geschichte
Workflow
Vorbereitung vor dem Shooting
Set Aufbau
Ausleuchtung
Tethering Shooting (Live Vorschau per Lightroom)
Umgang mit Model
Bildbearbeitung &Composing

Eckdaten:

Teilnehmer Max.10
Location Haus der Offiziere
Treffpunkt 10:00 Am Juliusturm 55 (Parkplatz Crunchfit)
11:00 U Bahnhof Innsbrucker Platz
12:00 Hauptallee 116/6, 15806 Zossen
Für alle ohne KFZ ist noch genug Platz

Ablauf 12:30 Begrüßung und Einleitung
13:00-16:00 Aufbau und Shooting
16:00-17:00 Pause
17:00-19:00 Bildbearbeitung und Verabschiedung und eine kleine Überraschung

Preis 1 Tag 99€
Beide Tage 169€

Varieté meets Fashion

Was euch hier erwartet? Eine Artistin und ein Model die in verschieden Sets in Szene Gesetzt werden.
Hier geht es darum verschiedene Sets in einer Location zu finden und zusammen mit dem Model richtig zu inszenieren.
Jeder Teilnehmer bekommt die Gelegenheit selbst zu *shooten und Anweisungen zu geben.

Was vermittelt der Referent?

Persönliche Geschichte
Workflow
Vorbereitung vor dem Shooting
Set Aufbau
Ausleuchtung
Tethering Shooting (Live Vorschau per Lightroom)
Umgang mit Model
Bildbearbeitung &Composing

Eckdaten:

Teilnehmer Max.10
Location Haus der Offiziere
Treffpunkt 10:00 Am Juliusturm 55 (Parkplatz Crunchfit)
11:00 U Bahnhof Innsbrucker Platz
12:00 Hauptallee 116/6, 15806 Zossen
Für alle ohne KFZ ist noch genug Platz

Ablauf 12:30 Begrüßung und Einleitung
13:00-16:00 Aufbau und Shooting
16:00-17:00 Pause
17:00-19:00 Bildbearbeitung und Verabschiedung und eine kleine Überraschung

Preis 1 Tag 99€
Beide Tage 169€

Voraussetzungen für beide Workshops sind:

Grundkenntnisse Fotografie Blende, Belichtungszeit,Iso
sowie Basiskenntnisse in der Bildbearbeitung mit Photoshop
sowie Basis Englisch Kenntnisse
Laptop wäre vom Vorteil für das Nachbearbeiten.

Was ist im Preis inbegriffen?
Miete der Location
Getränke und Snacks
Model,Visa und Artist
Sowie Transfer

Für weitere Infos und Buchung
info@workshop-factory.de
Tel: 0176 636 30 668

We were actually chatting about it and found it quite crazy that we managed to convince somebody… that we’ve never met before… to send somebody else we’ve never met before 8500$ worth of equipment. Wild eh?

Anyways, things went smoothly on the plane and we actually managed to write down almost 80 addresses down onto these awesome cute envelopes we hope to send to you soon! We took the chance to film some (hopefully) awesome BTS footage by clamping our GoPro onto a Nasty Clamp from above haha. It attracted quite a lot of attention and by the middle of the trip, we knew everyone left, right, front and back of us!

After getting off the plane, we took a couple seconds to sort out all our equipment and to our great surprise some random guy coming out of the plane came by and randomly told us :”good luck on your von wong does Europe tour!” Turns out Alexis Bourdages-Chabot was a fellow videographer who was coming to Brussels to shoot a documentary of Cora (a pretty huge breakfast chain in Montreal), and he had seen our project passing by on facebook. Five minutes in Belgium, already felt like a star. It was quite amazing. We chatted all through customs and finally ended up inviting him out to have supper with us later on!

Right after landing, we ran off to pick up our shinny van and headed off to Thomas’s place. Turns out Thomas actually lives in a tiny little village called Chapel-lez Herlaimont which didn’t even have a coffee shop for us to drop by. They did have a carnival that was setting up… very typical

From there, we snapped up some groceries and headed off to Thomas’s to grab a quick lunch and 3 hours of much needed sleep. Erwan turned out to need much more than 3 hours because when we woke up to start prepping the 8500$ of gear that Lovinpix.com had provided us. He was nauseous from lack of sleep so we ended up punishing him and keeping him wrapped up in blankets while we set up, tested and organized the rest of the equipment.

By the time we were done cleaning up, Erwan was still fealing quite woozy so we abandoned him to go down to have dinner with a group of fans! We had an amazing meal in downtown Brussels at Casa Mia, which almost ended in disaster with me forgetting the camera at the location… lol. Go genius Ben! Regardless, things turned out quite nicely and Alexis even brought his video-rig so we had a temporary Erwan replacement to film some video footage! Here are a couple photos of our night

Things ended pretty late and by the time Thomas and I got back home it was already 1 AM so we had the chance to grab a quick 2 hour nap before popping up to get ready for our shoot!! By 3 AM Erwan, Thomas and I were up and bouncing getting ready.

It is currently 5:20 AM and we’re driving off to break into an abandoned chamber of commerce to shoot our first subject… Chester Van Bommel from Artsome.be …

Stay tuned!!

Final post from Montreal before we begin our Europe tour! Last chance to grab a DVD , print or polaroid  www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope

Check out the blog writeup for lighting diagrams, setup shots and more!

http://www.vonwong.com/blog/epic-medieval-photoshoot/

Also BTS video by Laurence Turcotte-Fraser - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJYW8GYMJa8

-

Another glorious photograph of Les Artisans D’azure this time riding horses generally provided by the lovely Catherine Toussaint. These shots were taken in mid day sunlight so I did my best to overpower the sun with my beautiful Profoto D1′s provided by LL Lozeau but unfortunately I couldn’t quite get rid of all of the shadows… Bah!!

Shooting with animals was honestly quite a challenge, the horses were really not quite used to crowds and my initial idea of having horses galloping towards me didn’t quite work out. Maybe next time!

-

By this time the sun had finally hidden behind the clouds and I could finally overpower the sun to shoot this group photo. This time around, all elements were actually present (yes, we had people crawling over the roof!). I wanted to try something a little different so I actually shot the whole thing in four seperate shots to create a group panorama. Exploiting the fact that profotos at full power require 7 seconds of retouch time, I shot the subjects farther away first so that they’d be properly exposed and wouldn’t expose the heroes closer to us! Friend and retoucher Chester Van Bommel (www.artsome.be) – one of the subjects that we’ll be shooting in our Von Wong does Europe tour -www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope actually helped put this whole thing together, photoshop & all.

Read the rest of the story here.

–

Two weeks ago, I received a message from one of my fellow photographers Kelso, who told me that the folks over at Les Artisans D’azure were extremely interested in working with me. I’ve always been a huge medieval buff so I made some time in my crazy schedule and squeezed in a quick visit. When I got there, it was like being a kid in a toy store… I was running around having the time of my life checking out everything they had to offer. By the time I left the store, we had already set a shoot date, found ourselves an awesome location to shoot at as well as developped a vague story. By the evening, after a couple facebook shout-outs, we were at 20 models.

A couple days later, I had assembled my assistants, makeup and video crew. A week later, we had horses confirmed. A couple days after that,LL Lozeau agreed to sponsor about 40,000$ worth of profoto flashes for my shoot. A couple days before the shoot, we were at 55 confirmed participants… Things were going amazingly smoothly…

The day before the photoshoot was a whole different matter… weather forecast announced -3 degrees the day before with snow, hail, 30km/hr winds and general unhappiness all around!!! Myself and a couple others set out to camp out the night before to get in some location scouting and planning and had a merry campfire in the wind, hail and more. Of course, no signal at the medieval village supplied by L’Atelier du Loisir meant that we had no idea how many people were actually going to show up the day of the shoot so we kept fingers crossed while huddling under the blankets.

I was pleasently surprised to see over 80% of the people that had commited actually showed up under the cold rain to join us for this amazing photoshoot. We had the most amazing committed models trudging and shivering through rain and mud just to take a couple epic photographs.

Here’s one of those shots.

 Be sure to check back soon… Behind the Scenes video by Laurence and her crew coming up soon

–

Costume Design: Les Artisans d’Azure - www.artisansdazure.com

Samuel Tremblay Gagnon

Marc André Thibault

Steeve Verville

Maxime Turgeon

Genevieve Cotineau

Stephane Normandin

Sponsors:

Calimacil - www.calimacil.com
L’Atelier du Loisir - www.gn.qc.ca
LL Lozeau – Profoto flashes - www.lozeau.com

Makeup:
Jessica Renahan, Lisa-Marie Charron, Patricia Lapointe

Hair: Jazz Hairstylist, Manuelle Lessard

Assist: Allison B., Jessika Chiasson, Nadia Zheng

BTS Photography: Claude Campagna Lupien, Monique Guillbault

Video: Laurence Turcotte-Fraser, Sael Simard

Photoshop: Chester Van Bommel - www.artsome.be

Two weeks ago, I received a message from one of my fellow photographers Kelso, who told me that the folks over at Les Artisans D’azure were extremely interested in working with me. I’ve always been a huge medieval buff so I made some time in my crazy schedule and squeezed in a quick visit. When I got there, it was like being a kid in a toy store… I was running around having the time of my life checking out everything they had to offer. By the time I left the store, we had already set a shoot date, found ourselves an awesome location to shoot at as well as developed a vague story. By the evening, after a couple facebook shout-outs, we were at 20 models.

A couple days later, I had assembled my assistants, makeup and video crew. A week later, we had horses confirmed. A couple days after that,LL Lozeau agreed to sponsor about 40,000$ worth of profoto flashes for my shoot. A couple days before the shoot, we were at 55 confirmed participants… Things were going amazingly smoothly…

The day before the photoshoot was a whole different matter… weather forecast announced -3 degrees the day before with snow, hail, 30km/hr winds and general unhappiness all around!!! Myself and a couple others set out to camp out the night before to get in some location scouting and planning and had a merry campfire in the wind, hail and more. Of course, no signal at the medieval village supplied by L’Atelier du Loisir meant that we had no idea how many people were actually going to show up the day of the shoot so we kept fingers crossed while huddling under the blankets.

I was pleasantly surprised to see over 80% of the people that had committed actually showed up under the cold rain to join us for this amazing photoshoot. We had the most amazing committed models trudging and shivering through rain and mud just to take a couple epic photographs.

We had four solid concepts that we wanted to develop

Concept #1:

The idea was to composite an image where our heroes were surrounded by a horde of evil minions, Diablo III style. We had two guys jumping from the sides of the building that were shot separately. Yes, there was real fire in the photo! It’s kinda hard to make a proper lighting diagram but this is about what it looked like. The flashes were placed on the second floor of the building pointing downwards to create some sort of “spotlight” effect on our central figures while the speedlights were used as kickers. Of course, as with all shoots involving a whole bunch of people, it’s hard to get everything right all at once!! There are many things I would personally enjoy seeing fixed but… there’s always next time

Concept #2:

We wanted to create a sort of “banner shot” where the heroes were running away, escaping from this tavern of doom through these massive barn doors. We had the smoke machine rigged right in front of the heroes so that it would come bleeding out into the open. to light the rear scene, I simply placed to bare monoblocks inside the building pointing downwards, allowing the smoke to take care of diffusing the light. From the front, a simple baby octobox+ monobloc to add a little kick to our main characters. By this time, the rain had pretty much trickled down to nothing more than a drizzle which gave me the liberty to actually place the flashes outside the barn!

Concept #3:

The idea was to have an our heroes charging through our horde of evil minions but unfortunately the horses didn’t turn out quite as cooperative as we had hoped. Also, it would seem that galloping requires a certain level of experience that our armoured heroes didn’t have so we had to settle for a dusty battle scene. At this point in time, the weather suddenly decided to cooperate (relatively) and we were suddenly showered with radian beams of sun… really not cool when you don’t have the power to overpower the sun!! Although I had a set of Pro-8a lying around, I didn’t have anything close to a 6000W generator required to power the dinky devices so they sat in their case alone and forgotten. I compensated by placing the flashes strategically around our heroes and settled for softening the shadows. We had the smoke machine behind our riders which really helped to diffuse both the harsh sunlight and our flashes.

Nothing very fancy here, just a couple large modifiers all around our heroes to make them pop out a little (as high as they could go, 45 degrees downwards… max power!!)

Concept #4:

By the time we hit our fourth concept, the sun had finally hidden behind the clouds and I could finally overpower the sun to shoot this group photo. This time around, all elements were actually present (yes, we had people crawling over the roof!). I wanted to try something a little different so I actually shot the whole thing in four seperate shots to create a group panorama. Exploiting the fact that profotos at full power require 7 seconds of retouch time, I shot the subjects farther away first so that they’d be properly exposed and wouldn’t expose the heroes closer to us! We had a second profoto equiped with a softbox hanging out of a second floor window to highlight our friendly necromancer. I asked my good friend and retoucher Chester Van Bommel (www.artsome.be) – one of the subjects that we’ll be shooting in our Von Wong does Europe tour – www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope to help me put the whole shot together since I was actually running quite short on editing time!!

And that’s how the epic photoshoot went. There are a couple other shots that I would like to edit but I’m simply out of time with the whole Europtrip coming together.
For those of you who are interested in learning not just about lighting setups but HOW you put together a mass photoshoot, check out the write-up I did for UDI over at DIYPhotography – http://www.diyphotography.net/how-to-organize-a-mass-photoshoot-in-under-2-weeks

Oh and by the way, special thanks to our heroic videographer for putting the BTS video! Laurence Turcotte-Fraser

–

Costume Design: Les Artisans d’Azure – www.artisansdazure.com

Samuel Tremblay Gagnon
Marc André Thibault
Steeve Verville
Maxime Turgeon
Genevieve Cotineau
Stephane Normandin

Sponsors:

Calimacil – www.calimacil.com
L’Atelier du Loisir – www.gn.qc.ca
LL Lozeau – Profoto flashes – www.lozeau.com

Makeup:
Jessica Renahan, Lisa-Marie Charron, Patricia Lapointe

Hair: Jazz Hairstylist, Manuelle Lessard

Assist: Allison B., Jessika Chiasson, Nadia Zheng

BTS Photography: Claude Campagna Lupien, Monique Guillbault

Video: Laurence Turcotte-Fraser, Sael Simard

Like what I do? Support my Von Wong does Europe tour – www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope

Another glorious photograph of Les Artisans D'azure this time riding horses generally provided by the lovely Catherine Toussaint. These shots were taken in mid day sunlight so I did my best to overpower the sun with my beautiful Profoto D1's provided by LL Lozeau but unfortunately I couldn't quite get rid of all of the shadows… Bah!!

Shooting with animals was honestly quite a challenge, the horses were really not quite used to crowds and my initial idea of having horses galloping towards me didn't quite work out. Maybe next time!

-

By this time the sun had finally hidden behind the clouds and I could finally overpower the sun to shoot this group photo. This time around, all elements were actually present (yes, we had people crawling over the roof!). I wanted to try something a little different so I actually shot the whole thing in four seperate shots to create a group panorama. Exploiting the fact that profotos at full power require 7 seconds of retouch time, I shot the subjects farther away first so that they'd be properly exposed and wouldn't expose the heroes closer to us! Friend and retoucher Chester Van Bommel (www.artsome.be) – one of the subjects that we'll be shooting in our Von Wong does Europe tour -www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope actually helped put this whole thing together, photoshop & all. 

Read the rest of the story here.

–

Two weeks ago, I received a message from one of my fellow photographers Kelso, who told me that the folks over at Les Artisans D'azure were extremely interested in working with me. I've always been a huge medieval buff so I made some time in my crazy schedule and squeezed in a quick visit. When I got there, it was like being a kid in a toy store… I was running around having the time of my life checking out everything they had to offer. By the time I left the store, we had already set a shoot date, found ourselves an awesome location to shoot at as well as developped a vague story. By the evening, after a couple facebook shout-outs, we were at 20 models. 

A couple days later, I had assembled my assistants, makeup and video crew. A week later, we had horses confirmed. A couple days after that,LL Lozeau agreed to sponsor about 40,000$ worth of profoto flashes for my shoot. A couple days before the shoot, we were at 55 confirmed participants… Things were going amazingly smoothly…

The day before the photoshoot was a whole different matter… weather forecast announced -3 degrees the day before with snow, hail, 30km/hr winds and general unhappiness all around!!! Myself and a couple others set out to camp out the night before to get in some location scouting and planning and had a merry campfire in the wind, hail and more. Of course, no signal at the medieval village supplied by L'Atelier du Loisir meant that we had no idea how many people were actually going to show up the day of the shoot so we kept fingers crossed while huddling under the blankets.

I was pleasently surprised to see over 80% of the people that had commited actually showed up under the cold rain to join us for this amazing photoshoot. We had the most amazing committed models trudging and shivering through rain and mud just to take a couple epic photographs.

Here's one of those shots. 

 Be sure to check back soon… Behind the Scenes video by Laurence and her crew coming up soon  

–

Costume Design: Les Artisans d'Azure - www.artisansdazure.com

Samuel Tremblay Gagnon 

Marc André Thibault

Steeve Verville

Maxime Turgeon

Genevieve Cotineau

Stephane Normandin

Sponsors:

Calimacil - www.calimacil.com
L'Atelier du Loisir - www.gn.qc.ca
LL Lozeau – Profoto flashes - www.lozeau.com

Makeup:
Jessica Renahan, Lisa-Marie Charron, Patricia Lapointe

Hair: Jazz Hairstylist, Manuelle Lessard

Assist: Allison B., Jessika Chiasson, Nadia Zheng

BTS Photography: Claude Campagna Lupien, Monique Guillbault

Video: Laurence Turcotte-Fraser, Sael Simard

Photoshop: Chester Van Bommel - www.artsome.be

When the darkness comes, and silent reigns… sometimes all we can do is just hold on.

-

Sister shot of my photoshoot with stripper Suntory. We actually took the 20 foot backdrop and TAPED it to the roof to make this shot happen haha. Since it wasn't one of those fancy thick ones, I had a fantastically fun time actually darkening each individual speck between chains to make the whole shot come out solid black. What a pain  

Turns out I'm leaving in less than 3 days now for my insane europe tour and I have so many photos to barrel through and edit… videos to update… not to mention packing, organizing… !!

My mind is exploding with the amount of stuff that needs to be accomplished!!

--

Results of a photoshoot from Yesterday. Took some meditative time yesterday post-shoot to cool down, relax and edit. It's been a while since I've had the chance to sit down and get some nice relaxing editing down…

The shoot was a pretty wild one and we're going to have an amazing video prepared for you guys reasonably soon (though it might be ready only after we've begun our eurotrip to be honest!) 

This shoot was thrown together in less than two weeks. Suntory, a male stripper, sent me a short facebook message asking me what my rates were. I told him that I couldn't tell him a fixed rate unless I had a better idea of what he was looking for. He replied saying that he wanted photos of himself, dehydrated, hanging from chains with tar pouring down on him. My reply? Sounds AMAZING, I'll do it for free. Why? Because I would much rather someone worry about paying for the most awesome photoshoot ever than paying for my rate. 

We took his budget and re-invested it straight into the photoshoot. We had a custom metal bar built with welded hooks that could support over a 1000 pounds of massive metal chains we rented from a traction-chain warehouse. We rented out a friend's loft for the afternoon and put the whole thing together in about 3 gruesome hours of hard work (you try hanging 200 pound chains from an 18 foot high ladder!) 

Jessica Renahan, an amazing makeup artist who I collaborate with regularly put together a custom mixture of oil paint, charcol and vasoline that we buttered onto our heroically dehydrated stripper. Although we did encounter some technical diffculties here and there we did end up with some pretty amazing stuff.

Be sure to check back for the BTS video. We hung a GoPro from the cieling with the help of some Nasty Clamps to capture some pretty amazing overhead footages (we hope) !

-

Credits: 
Photo: Benjamin "Von Wong"
Model: Suntory 
Makeup: Jessica Renahan
Assist: Kaleena Jay, Nadia Zheng

vonwong.com - Facebook - Twitter - Flickr - Blog

Second shot from my Agonist shoot!

Bts Video by Five Knights Productions – www.fiveknightsproductions.com

Alissa from The Agonist contacted me TWO WEEKS before shoot deadline to ask me if we could put together some sort of crazy shoot. After an hour of crazy brainstorming we managed to pull together an insane fight concept that we put together in one week (leaving one more week for retouching)!

We pulled our resources together and managed to whip up in a week: A garage to shoot in, destructible clothing, and all the random objects you see lying around (fire hydrant, couch, etc…). Alissa did the makeup/rips for all the boys giving me a good three hours to set up a crazy 10 light or so setup.

Full blog post with story/llighting setup:http://www.vonwong.com/blog/the-agonist-promo-2012-2/
Bts Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ps8f1UxiSI

vonwong.com - Facebook - Twitter - Flickr - Blog

Alissa from The Agonist contacted me TWO WEEKS before shoot deadline to ask me if we could put together some sort of crazy shoot. After an hour of crazy brainstorming we managed to pull together an insane fight concept that we put together in one week (leaving one more week for retouching)!

We pulled our resources together and managed to whip up in a week: A garage to shoot in, destructible clothing, and all the random objects you see lying around (fire hydrant, couch, etc…). Alissa did the makeup/rips for all the boys giving me a good three hours to set up a crazy 10 light or so setup.

Oh and that exploding glass behind her head in the shot? Yah, that’s real. We exploded some neon lights for the shoot.

We did two main group shots in addition to a bunch of singles.

The first group shot is the main fight scene where we used a total of 8 flashes to light up the scene. Since I had a whole bunch of time to set up my lights and the scene (close to 2 hours), it really gave me the time to build the shot up like I wanted to!

Check out the final result:

For those interested in the technical lighting jargon here are the specs:

On either side of our main subjects (Alissa, Danny) we had some nice strong edge lighting from some massive gridded softboxes. To add a bit of soft fill to lighten the shadows we had a smaller softbox angled 45 degrees upwards on a lower intensity. Grouped with those two main gridded softboxes, we had a pair of speedlights gel’ed blue to give a nice blueish hue to the shadows of the image. From there, we had a pair of monoblocs on either side of the scene, bare, just bringing in a bit of harsh hairlight that was mildly diffused by the smoke spewing out of our glorious smoke machine. And the final killer touch, in my humble opinion that totally makes the shot is the speedlights gel’ed green in the back behind those plastic-textured horizontal flaps. We bounced that one off the back wall to get a nice even distribution coming forward.

In the final shot that is the conclusion of our shoot, we wanted things to be a lot more murky and soft… so we pumped the smoke machine up to full and had an overall haze just overlaid onto the photograph. We tossed things around a littlebit to change the setup and then had them lie around just… relaxing. The shot was created by strapping my camera onto the tripod and taking a nice shot from above.

Once again, the technical stuff aside, the only difference between this setup and the last one was that we basically removed the hair lights from the rear monoblocks and lifted one of the softboxes off the ground to create a semi spotlight effect on Alissa. Here’s what the lighting setup looks like:

Curious to see more? Check out The Agonist fan page on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheAgonistOfficial

Special thanks to Raphael Loudet and Yves Pelletier for helping out at the shoot!

Like what I do? Interested in learning about the photoshop behind my work? Check out our Von Wong does Europe project – http://www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope

By this time the sun had finally hidden behind the clouds and I could finally overpower the sun to shoot this group photo. This time around, all elements were actually present (yes, we had people crawling over the roof!). I wanted to try something a little different so I actually shot the whole thing in four seperate shots to create a group panorama. Exploiting the fact that profotos at full power require 7 seconds of retouch time, I shot the subjects farther away first so that they'd be properly exposed and wouldn't expose the heroes closer to us! Friend and retoucher Chester Van Bommel (www.artsome.be) – one of the subjects that we'll be shooting in our Von Wong does Europe tour – www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope actually helped put this whole thing together, photoshop & all. 

Read the rest of the story here.

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Two weeks ago, I received a message from one of my fellow photographers Kelso, who told me that the folks over at Les Artisans D'azure were extremely interested in working with me. I've always been a huge medieval buff so I made some time in my crazy schedule and squeezed in a quick visit. When I got there, it was like being a kid in a toy store… I was running around having the time of my life checking out everything they had to offer. By the time I left the store, we had already set a shoot date, found ourselves an awesome location to shoot at as well as developped a vague story. By the evening, after a couple facebook shout-outs, we were at 20 models. 

A couple days later, I had assembled my assistants, makeup and video crew. A week later, we had horses confirmed. A couple days after that,LL Lozeau agreed to sponsor about 40,000$ worth of profoto flashes for my shoot. A couple days before the shoot, we were at 55 confirmed participants… Things were going amazingly smoothly…

The day before the photoshoot was a whole different matter… weather forecast announced -3 degrees the day before with snow, hail, 30km/hr winds and general unhappiness all around!!! Myself and a couple others set out to camp out the night before to get in some location scouting and planning and had a merry campfire in the wind, hail and more. Of course, no signal at the medieval village supplied by L'Atelier du Loisir meant that we had no idea how many people were actually going to show up the day of the shoot so we kept fingers crossed while huddling under the blankets.

I was pleasently surprised to see over 80% of the people that had commited actually showed up under the cold rain to join us for this amazing photoshoot. We had the most amazing committed models trudging and shivering through rain and mud just to take a couple epic photographs.

Here's one of those shots. 

 Be sure to check back soon… Behind the Scenes video by Laurence and her crew coming up soon  

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Costume Design: Les Artisans d'Azure - www.artisansdazure.com

Samuel Tremblay Gagnon 

Marc André Thibault

Steeve Verville

Maxime Turgeon

Genevieve Cotineau

Stephane Normandin

Sponsors:

Calimacil - www.calimacil.com
L'Atelier du Loisir - www.gn.qc.ca
LL Lozeau – Profoto flashes - www.lozeau.com

Makeup:
Jessica Renahan, Lisa-Marie Charron, Patricia Lapointe

Hair: Jazz Hairstylist, Manuelle Lessard

Assist: Allison B., Jessika Chiasson, Nadia Zheng

BTS Photography: Claude Campagna Lupien, Monique Guillbault

Video: Laurence Turcotte-Fraser, Sael Simard

Photoshop: Chester Van Bommel – www.artsome.be