High School Girls and Guitars - A Charity Event

This past weekend, I was asked to shoot some photos to be used at a charity event at Presentation High School. Our good friend, Tracey, was in charge of this event and wanted to have a group picture in a cool place. Since the theme of the charity event is going to be "On Tour", she thought it would be cool to have the pictures taken at a local guitar shop. So Tracey called The Guitar Center in Santa Clara and they agreed to help out.

The people at the Guitar Center were great and they opened their special room (with the really expensive electric guitars) and removed all of the price tags, which would have been distracting to the image. The problem was...there was a glass wall on one side and a wall of glass doors on the other. To make things even more challenging, the ceiling was black. All this is perfect if you are trying a guitar, but not so great if you are trying to "compose" with your camera. (Good pun, huh?)

So...what did I do? I angled the 580EXII flash at a 45 degree and lit the room with a bunch of reflecting light. And you know what? It actually worked. :)

The goal was to get one nice group shot of all of the girls together in the room. My wife and I positioned the amps so that they would make good props. Then we asked for some cool looking guitars and I fired away.

When we were done shooting the group shots, we had completed the "job" but I thought that it would be fun to get individual shots of each of the girls. Here I positioned the subject so that her glasses would reflect the wall of guitars (and not the photographer!).

And then my wife (the creative director) had the great idea of having the girl throw her head back to give us that rocker hair. Fun stuff!

And so we continued...shooting different images of each girl.

Of all the "rocker hair shots" this was my favorite. I love her expression and the way that her hair is flying up but not covering her face.

All of these pretty girls help make the photographer look good. And all of them were so nice and had so much fun with us.

More rocker attitude!

If you know me, you know that I will try anything for a good shot. Here I asked Tracey to join her daughter, Kennedy, for a mother daughter shot. As you can tell, Tracey has no shortage of personality!

Here is Kennedy giving me her "senior" pose, guitar in hand.

I am always trying to break out of my "rigid mold" and in doing so, I am trying to shoot more images that are not perfectly straight.

Here I rotated the camera to match the line of the guitar, not worrying about lines of the background. It adds a different dimension to the images, and since these are supposed to be a little more edgy, I think it works well.

Photographing these girls was a lot of fun for all of us. My wife and I liked the fact that we could help out a worthy cause. The parents had fun watching their kids ham it up for the camera. But most importantly, the girls liked being models for a day.