OMG! These photographers are floating on air!

I went on an incredible trip to Israel with a group of amazing photographers thanks to “Vibe Israel” and Kinetis. Each photographer was handpicked from New York to Australia and in-between, including me! Beside my buddy Jared Polin, aka FroKnowsPhoto, we were with Mike Kelley, Simon Pollock, Rebecca Litchfield and Benjamin Von Wong. Each of these folks are amazing photographers and have very unique styles and specialities. I can say that I learned so much from all of them and felt incredibly inspired by their work.

One day while in Tel Aviv, we had some time to kill before dinner and went down to the beach to check out a drum circle which was fine, but the jetty and silhouetted figures against the setting sun was really cool. I started taking some photos and thought that this was my chance to get portraits of all of everyone and I knew it’d have to be epic.

In order to get the sky looking really cool, it required that you had a fast shutter speed, but by doing that, the people on the jetty became silhouetted. I love that look but then I had another idea…

I had my Fuji X100s, a Nikon SB800 and a generic Infrared trigger. I love this setup because I can trigger my X100s up to it’s maximum shutter speed of 1/4000 sec. I put the SB800 in slave mode and held the flash in my left hand and fired it bare at my subject. The idea was to have a fast shutter speed to slam the ambient light, while illuminating my subject, and freezing them in action.

To further help achieve this result, I was at the bottom of the jetty on the beach and had my subjects stand on the jetty above. From there it was basically 1-2-3 jump! And voila! We have photographers floating in the air. Shooting up with a low camera angle at the sky helped to give the illusion they were just floating.

I love this kind of shoot because it’s totally spontaneous and simple and fun so everyone was super-excited to participate.

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