Jessica and the Merry-go-round

A while back I had this idea to shoot someone on the old style playground merry go round. I was hanging out with Curtis (translation: eating steak and drinking mojitos), and he said he knew of such a place not to far away. We decide to kidnap, err I mean, convince Jessica to go for a ride with us the next morning. Jessica is a family friend of ours. She had no reason not to believe we were going shoe shopping. Well she ended up being a good sport about it and we set off to make some images.

I wanted to rig a remote camera and strobes to the merry go round. You see, I didn’t want to be on that thing while it was going round and round. Not to long ago I was on a U.S. Naval vessel known as a HSV or high speed vessel. We were on our way to Spain from Morocco and the seas were angry. The trip lasted almost 24 hours and I was seasick for 20 of them. Now in my defense the seas were really, really angry. Anyway, I didn’t want to sit on this thing and go round and round so I rigged up the camera. I wasn’t worried about Jess, she’s young and needs to earn her sea legs anyway.

I attached some Pocket Wizards, aimed the strobes and started to spin this thing with Jess on it. I got it going pretty fast and then just started firing the camera with the remote. The images were coming out pretty cool. I should have brought my laptop and used the remote live view option to capture the images in real time. It would have been a whole lot less spinning, stopping, reviewing and spinning again.

We changed positions and I had Jess lie down on the floor plate. I put a snoot on one of the strobes and let the open shade handle the fill.

By now Jess has been spinning quite a bit and she needed a break. We moved over to the swings that were close by. I shot a few pictures of Jess swinging but the damage was done.

She was already turning green! Thanks Jess for being a good sport and thanks to Curtis for shooting the behind the scenes images.