The Boyfriend and I were offered the chance to do a photo booth at our friends’ club “CODE”. Hosted at the Stud in San Francisco’s SOMA dis­trict, it was the per­fect chance for us to break out of street pho­tog­ra­phy and into some­thing more per­sonal. Our good friend J, who had done this before at the Cat Club for “Apoc­olypso”, pro­vided the tem­plate : A con­tin­u­ous key light, sim­ple back drop, and (for him) a remotely trig­gered flash nes­tled in a great big soft box.

We didn’t have quiet the space to work with at the Stud as J did at the Cat Club, so we decided to scale down a bit. We set­tled on a pair of 480 ex II Speed­lights, a key light fash­ioned from a work lamp, and a neu­tral can­vas backdrop.

The 480’s were a joy to work with, espe­cially after going through a cou­ple frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ences test-driving the Viv­i­tar DF383 on my 60d. Turns out you get what you pay for! As this was both of our first foray into flash pho­tog­ra­phy, we took a few days to get the hang of shoot­ing under dif­fer­ent con­di­tions, bounc­ing and dif­fu­sion settings.

We arrived at the Stud and began to set up, only to be pleas­antly sur­prised by a glit­ter­ing orange back­drop already in place where we were going to drop our neu­tral gray one. A few test shots later, and it was set­tled : the sequins were pretty damn cool. Ditch­ing the gray for this month, we focused on get­ting our expo­sure, flash power, and other camera-y set­tings dialed in.

The night itself was a lot of fun. As peo­ple trick­led in and got loose, they inevitably found their way to our photo booth. Lots of good energy and some really silly poses later, and we had our­selves a nice slice of night life.

Check the full gallery at the Ani­mals With Cam­eras blog.