For the past year, I’ve been doing a series of collaborations with my favorite prop house ACME Brooklyn. We’ve been building sets exclusively out of their props and doing shoots that have no creative limits except to only use props from ACME Brooklyn.

For a long time, I’ve had the idea of doing a photoshoot with a family where everyone in the family has an afro. To add on to that, I wanted to use only circular objects in the set to give it some character and an overall concept. I looked through the prop house with Shawn Patrick and we pulled a ton of fun circular objects that could work.

As we were putting things in the set, we realized that visually for the shot, the more empty the space the better the shot, so we didn’t go too heavy handed with the spherical objects. We ultimately ended up with a fish bowl, a stationary bike, a couple couches, a clock, and a ton of
cheese balls.

From a lighting standpoint, I typically go with really soft motivated lights. But for this, it was already so surreal and bizarre that I felt not everything needed to be coming from a motivated light source, so I took some liberties.

Ultimately I ended up using 4 lights:
Light 1: Siros 800 S with a 5’ Octabox through an 8’x8’ 1 stop silk.
Light 2: Siros 800 S with a beauty dish and a grid, boomed directly overhead.
Light 3: Siros 800 L with a P70 directly aimed at the set from camera right and high above
Light 4: Siros 800 S with a 4’x1’ strip box, shot from behind the set to give a little bit of rim light
on the subjects
Camera: Fuji GFX100 with 32-64 Lens.

The stylist Jess Mederos pulled a second look, so we decided to do another setup. We switched out most of the set pieces and the carpet so that it would look totally different. My goal with Light 3: Siros 800 L with a P70 was to really give the curtains some depth and dimension but since they weren’t in the second setup, I put this light through the silk so there wouldn’t be hard shadows. Other than that tweak, the lighting setup was the same for this set.

Credits:
Photographer: Justin Bettman
Photo Assistant: Biagio Dell’Aiera & Eric Hart
Set Design/Props: ACME Brooklyn / Shawn Patrick Anderson
Wardrobe: Jess Mederos
Hair Stylist: Anike Rabiu
Make Up Artist: Soo Park
Production: Marissa Ericson & Brian Colgan

Connect with Justin Bettman:

Instagram: @justinbettman

Facebook: Justin Bettman

Website: www.justinbettman.com