When you have a few hours of racing going on but you don't want to leave your depot while the working photographers you are supporting are out and about in the 93+ degree heat, what do two gimpy Nikon Professional Service reps do? They set up a mini studio with 4 speedlights, a table cloth, and invite the photographers to pose when returning their borrowed gear. The next step is to let attendees step in and get their portrait taken for free. That was the birth of the Indy People Project 2018

This year we challenged ourselves to shoot portraits of photographers at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with four Nikon SB-5000 speedlights, MagMod modifiers, and a D850. We used the 105 1.4 for 99% of the shots with the 35 1.4 Nikkor used for 3 shots in the group due to necessity for a wider lens. Then the characters started walking by wondering what we were up to. Being friendly we explained. Being friendly race fans they asked if they could join the fun. We obliged. Meeting all the people that come to this race is one of the cool parts of the event. All ages, shapes, backgrounds come together to celebrate speed. And drink. Lots of drinking. Our posing advice consisted of two pieces of tape on the ground and then trying to capture a bit of the character of the attendees.

A sociology study of sorts mixing with the science of light and the art of photography to create this project... Thank you for all who gave us their time (average about 45 seconds) 

Check below to see a Behind the Scenes shot of our set up....Main Light and fill light have MagMod Spheres on them while the two back lights have MagMod Grids on the Nikon SB-5000's. We were using the Nikon WR-10 set to control the flashes wirelessly making for changing the setting easy when needed. Shooting manual that wasn't often but it was nice to have the ability and not have to worry about line-of-site etc when commanding the flashes. You can see we are actually using the door to our depot to hold up part of the black table cloth that became our impromptu background. 

Brien is BANikon on Instagram

I'm JCPhotoMedia 

We hope you like it and we hope the people that stood in love the portraits as much as we loved taking them....

THE INDY PEOPLE PROJECT (CLICK TO VIEW THE WHOLE PROJECT)

Here is my favorite shot of the whole day - Brien took this one while i worked the lights. It makes me smile because I shot the same woman two years ago at the 100th Indy 500. She just happened to be peddling past us and we were able to get this image that i just absolutely love. I ended up shooting a lot of the image during the day but this one is my absolute fave and Brien did a great job capturing it.

Portraits taken at the 2018 Indy 500 using Nikon D850 and four Nikon SB-5000 Speedlights. Modification of the light was accomplished with the MagMod Sphere and Grids. Photo Credits - Brien Aho and JC Carey