Motorhead + Carhartt

In my last post I mentioned that I was doing some photos for a Japanese car magazine called Motorhead – these guys are definitely doing some of the most creative and interesting stuff in the Japanese auto-mag world. Here’s hoping I have a chance to travel for one of their features soon. I’d like Finland please.

Anyway! The magazine and a certain apparel label called Carhartt were doing a special giveaway of specially-designed jackets bearing the Motorhead logo. Pretty expensive stuff, as the jackets themselves weren’t cheap, so I don’t want to imagine how much the custom logo was. No chance of me picking up a freebie this time, so I’ll have to be content looking at the promo images I shot for the magazine.  The model you see there is Andre, a good friend of mine – he’ll be appearing in other posts in the near future, I wager .  The car is a beastly V8 Range Rover, which was a joy to ride around in the whole day as spacious cars in Tokyo are at quite a premium.

Lighting-wise I used the combination of the Profoto small fresnel (kindly on loan from Profoto Japan) and the Photek Softlighter on a pair of Profoto D1s hooked up to a Batpac.  What a great combination – the small fresnel is a photographer’s dream accessory for restricting light – it has a closable iris that allows you to control the spread of light, and the fresnel glass front softens the edges of the light, giving it some really nice falloff.  In combination with the Softlighter, which is basically a massive octa, you can get some pretty cool results using the old key+fill two light technique.  I’ve put some shots and outtakes from the shoot in this post. Enjoy!

Yes I know the English is wrong at the top (it should be ‘The World’s Greatest Custom Culture Magazine’), but they’ve fixed it for the next issue.  Too bad they didn’t consult with me before they made the jackets though.

Tagged as: car photography, commercial, editorial, fashion, irwin wong, japan, learn photography in Tokyo, photographer in japan, photographer in tokyo, profoto, strobist, tokyo photographer, tokyo photography