Friday 6 November 2015

A day in the studio shooting wooden skateboard wheels...


A day in the studio shooting wooden skateboard wheels, yes you read that right, wooden skateboard wheels, actually the wheels are made from recycled skateboard decks, made into blocks and then turned on a lathe. Peter Urbacz at The Splinter Cell produces these, and an array of other fine products.


Lighting for these shots was from two Bowens 250W heads, one camera right with a 22" Calumet Beauty Dish with a shower cap defuser, pointing down, the other head was camera left level with, but at 45° to the skateboard truck and wheels, with a Bowens 7" reflector with a 30° grid, additional light was reflected using gloss silver cards to put light under the wheels.


I didn't want anything to distract from the colours and patterns in the wheels, so I chose black Perspex to stand the truck on, and used black velvet as the background.


As usual my trusty Canon 5D MkIII, with a 24-70mm F2.8L lens, was mounted on a tripod, and I used an electronic cable release, with the mirror lock up turn on to reduce the chance of any camera shake from mirror movement.


The images were dropped into Photoshop to check for any spots of dust that I had missed whilst cleaning the perspex, and I made a few slight adjustments to enhance the colours to bring them closer to the original product.


All images ©2015 Alistair Kerr Photography