16th lightGIANTS Friday night shoot. “Looners”

I have seen a few photos around the internet taken in a studio with balloons but when looking at most of them I thought they only out in 50% effort and needed to fill more space with balloons. Last year I was photographing a wedding and one of the guests had a extremely large bunch of balloons, there was a few kids that kept hiding among the balloons and every now and then you would see a hand or a head sticking out. All I could think was..... "I have to do this in the studio". So we blew up 400 black and white balloons and started to shoot.

Andreas Schott

Benita Kuttelwascher

Scott Lewis

The lighting concept was to keep the shadows and contrast that separated all the objects in the photo. When you have a lot of items the same colour in your photos you need to control the angel of the lighting so that shadows still fall where you require them. What we didn't think of was how much static was involved, it played havoc with the models hair. Next time ill be a bit more prepared.

Marco Spalluto

Laura Gube

Markus Wochele 

We only used 2 different lighting set-ups. But they couldn't have been more  different. The first set up was a large octo-box from directly above the models pointing down, using the balloons to reflect light back up for a bit of fill light. The second set-up was 2 strip lights set horizontally on both sides of the studio, and set down at eye level.

Thomas Reimann

And finally the world famous Making of/behind the screens video