The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

Here’s something a bit different from what I usually post: an advertising photo shoot with models and lights. Although in the past I haven’t actively sought assignments (not even mentioning my availability for them), I was still occasionally contacted to create commissioned images. In this case, what led to the job was my great familiarity with the Stanford University campus.

You probably know me for my landscape images, but as a photographer I enjoy the challenge of being versatile and reasonably proficient in all aspects of the craft. It’s like when you go to graduate school, you end up doing extremely specialized research in a sub-sub-sub area of a discipline, but you still have to demonstrate an understanding of your whole discipline so that you can see the whole picture and benefit from cross-fertilization of ideas. Besides travel and adventure situations, I actually photograph people quite a bit. Often those people are my family, and so far I haven’t released those images to the public (maybe one day…).

Those images were shot for a local bank’s advertising campaign at several locations, including a bank branch and various places on the Stanford campus. On advertising shots, many people (in this case the art director and models) need to be present. This generally leads to strict time constraints. I normally prefer to photograph using natural light, but because the shot had to take place in a single day, I sometimes had to work in difficult lighting rather than picking the conditions. This meant that it would be necessary to use supplementary lights. Because I had to work fast, I relied on small flashes and the Canon wireless TTL system. Although I could have done the job by myself with light stands, having my assistant to hold one of the lights on a pole significantly sped up the sessions. In the end, I delivered a final edit of more than a hundred images (out of about a thousand usable and processed images) encompassing more than twenty different set-ups.

Do you see something in common between this shot and the rest of my work ?