Earth is closed today. Get lost, Squidward!

So I had this idea of doing a photoshoot portraying myself as a futurist, intent on setting trends, challenging the norms when it comes to photography and future-proofing my equipment for work.

What better way then than to cosplay as Tony Stark from Avengers: Infinity War, surrounded by my Broncolor lights shot with my Sony A7RII?

The first time I saw him transform into Mark L with the aid of nanotechnology, I was totally blown away.

Recalling how his suit of armor always gets upgrades over time to battle the tougher opponents and future ones, I just thought wouldn’t it cool to translate that into future proofing for photography as well?

To make this shoot happen, I had to get myself some props. This was a legit excuse to buy some toys 😛

I conceptualized and planned for the shoot, but seeing how the logistics can be a nightmare, I enlisted the help of my friend, Tennant who was kind enough to, as he puts it, “carry things and push the shutter button”.

I had to carefully design the lighting setup for the shoot.

The plan was to have my Broncolor Siros L 400 x2, Siros L 800 x1, Broncolor Move 1200L power pack with MobiLEDs x2 featured with the various Broncolor modifiers and lighting equipment I have accumulated over the past 2 years. In a sense, this was a celebration of my gear too.

But where do we this? I wanted to pay homage to my beginnings. Kinda like an origin story. When I first started out shooting photography with off-camera flash, I did it at home and shot anywhere nearby – including my void deck and multistorey carpark.

Since I did not want to cause a disturbance to people driving, I decided to settle for the void deck at night over the weekend where the human traffic would be minimal.

For this shoot, I had both MobiLEDs attached to my 60×60 and 120×180 softboxes. One of the Siros L 400 was on the 85cm silver umbrella and another on the Focus 110 silver umbrella. The Siros L 800 was mated to a 70cm beauty dish.

My other modifiers were placed on the floor near the stands and 2x C-stands. Trivia time! Both my C-stands are by AVENGER (manufacturer). I designated them Steve and Tony. It makes sense when I bought them separately, I got Steve first since he was the First Avenger.

Once the lights and stands have been set up, it was go-time. I set the settings for the camera, opting for a slow shutter speed to pick up some ambient light and had all the Broncolor lights to fire off at once.

For this shoot, I used my Sony A7RII with a Sony Distagon T* FE 35mm f/1.4 ZA lens. I had the shutter dragged to 1/10 to catch some ambient light, kept the aperture small at f/16 so I’ll get as much sharpness as possible, and ISO at 100.

None of the lights would be facing me so I was pretty much backlit. However, thanks to the walls and ceilings of the void deck, the lights would reflect back onto me and still fill in the shadows on me.

We also had the camera on a tripod so that the framing would stay for this series of images.

Once I got the pose I wanted, Tennant helped to push the shutter. I would have opted for self-timer but the distance was too great and I didn’t want to sweat for the self-portrait. It was already a hot and humid night and the jacket wasn’t helping.

I thought it would be cool to have a GIF of this too so I made one using EZGIFmaker. It’s online. It’s easy. It’s free to use too!

Well, what do you think? To be honest, I prefer being behind the camera as opposed to being in front of it. Haha!

And with that, I just want to say…

I… am…