My friend Anna wanted to do a Star Wars themed shoot so that she could have a new profile pic for social media. This was going to be a shoot mainly just for funsies, rather than a proper cosplay shoot, so the plan was to play it a bit loose with the costuming requirements, rather than trying for movie accuracy.
I normally like to try to tie shoots like these together with some sort of storyline, making it easier to put together scenes with these original characters. The idea I came up with for this one was “The Padawan Chronicles”, the tale of a couple of young padawans who manage to escape Order 66 and go on the run with a precious cargo. The first season of “The Mandalorian” had just screened, so it was an easy decision for what that precious cargo would be 🙂
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Silvana and Dogbox were keen to participate as well, Sil as the second padawan, and Dogbox as the evil Sith Inquisitor charged with hunting them down. Our friend Beau was dragged in to assist with the shoot (and maybe get a Star Wars themed pic of his own).
As usual, the plan was to shoot in the evening on my back deck. It was mid-February, 2020. The devastating Australian bushfires of early 2020 had finally started to abate, with little smoke now hanging in the air, and the craziness of the COVID-19 pandemic had yet to hit.
The main goal was to get one or two solo portrait shots of each character, fulfilling Anna’s original desire for a new profile pic. After that, if there was time, I wanted to do a few “scenes”. One was a poster-style shot, then a couple of shots of the trio fighting.
I used speedlights for lighting, two softboxes at the front/side as required, and a third speedlight with a grid for back light. I’d had very mixed results with my rechargeable batteries in the last few shoots, where the battery life was concerned, so I bought a big pack of AA batteries from a discount shop. A mistake, as it turned out, as they didn’t work well with the speedlights for some reason, so we ran out of battery power a fter getting the elements for only a couple of the scene pics.
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After that, it was into Photoshop for compositing and editing. As of this writing, I still have a couple more shots to put together, but it’s all looking pretty good. For a more-or-less impromptu shoot I’m really happy with the way it’s worked out 🙂
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