The Girls Next door

Village Idiot · Jan 28, 2008

An episode of this was on last night while I was flipping through the channels.

They were "testing" four girls that wanted to be playmates and showed the photoshoot and all.

Looked like the photographer was using a 5d, a 70-200mm f/2.8L USM, and Pocket Wizards to trigger the flashes.

$3500 in gear. Doesn't really seem like a lot for a professional setup. Of course I wasn't counting the thousands in lighting gear though.

RiDE · Jan 28, 2008

Village Idiot said:
An episode of this was on last night while I was flipping through the channels.

They were "testing" four girls that wanted to be playmates and showed the photoshoot and all.

Looked like the photographer was using a 5d, a 70-200mm f/2.8L USM, and Pocket Wizards to trigger the flashes.

$3500 in gear. Doesn't really seem like a lot for a professional setup. Of course I wasn't counting the thousands in lighting gear though.

Not to mention what they pay the person who does all the photoshopping and airbrushing

Village Idiot · Jan 28, 2008

RiDE said:
Not to mention what they pay the person who does all the photoshopping and airbrushing

The were shooting with the app that let them view the photos as they took them and the ones straight out of the camera were pretty good.

gomez1018 · Jan 28, 2008

Seriously, I love that show. My fiance and I always watch it. I have to admit though it was a nice setup, although I thin the pics would have been 10x better if he had used Nikon

jk.

bryphotoguy · Jan 28, 2008

Having lots of expensive equiptment doesn't make a photographer a professional.
The 5D is a full frame camera and very suitable for portraits, so it that lens.

We are no longer required to carry wagon loads of supplies and chemicals to coat and process a 11x14" sheet of glass to make a wet plate collodion. A lot more equiptment was needed in the 1850's but I'm just trying to prove my point.

I could go out and take pics with my Diana which cost me a whole $25. All I need is some film and a working darkroom. I'd love to make shooting with my Diana a full time career but there's not a lot of money to be made in the art world.

Village Idiot · Jan 28, 2008

bryphotoguy said:
Having lots of expensive equiptment doesn't make a photographer a professional.
The 5D is a full frame camera and very suitable for portraits, so it that lens.

We are no longer required to carry wagon loads of supplies and chemicals to coat and process a 11x14" sheet of glass to make a wet plate collodion. A lot more equiptment was needed in the 1850's but I'm just trying to prove my point.

I could go out and take pics with my Diana which cost me a whole $25. All I need is some film and a working darkroom. I'd love to make shooting with my Diana a full time career but there's not a lot of money to be made in the art world.

But you do see a lot of high fashion and big publication photographers shooting with hasselblad and other medium format cameras. With the exception of sports mags, that's more of what I was expecting to see than a 5d. Even a 1Ds MKIII.

bryphotoguy · Jan 28, 2008

That's true.
The end result is a magazine which has a very low resolution so a Hasselblad is overkill. I am not sure how profitable Playboy is to equip all of their photographers with a H3DII-39.

KB3GZW · Jan 30, 2008

A friend of mine is into photography, he told me about the hasselblad. 30 Grand and 39 Megapixels. Thats a monster.

Village Idiot · Jan 31, 2008

KB3GZW said:
A friend of mine is into photography, he told me about the hasselblad. 30 Grand and 39 Megapixels. Thats a monster.

Supposedly a ton of noise over ISO 400. But then again, people with a $40,000 camera usually have enough money to buy studio lights.

fleurya · Jan 31, 2008

I just didn't get why he was using such a large zoom lens to the photos. Given the setup and the model proximity to the camera, do you really need that lens? I'm guessing a business like Playboy would have an extremely large arsenal of lenses to choose from.

Village Idiot · Jan 31, 2008

fleurya said:
I just didn't get why he was using such a large zoom lens to the photos. Given the setup and the model proximity to the camera, do you really need that lens? I'm guessing a business like Playboy would have an extremely large arsenal of lenses to choose from.

Quality + 5D = FF = no magnification factor to the focal length of the lens.

70mm on 1.6 crop Canon = 112mm
50mm on 1.6 crop Canon = 80mm
70mm on a full frame Canon = 70mm

So using a 70mm lens on a Canon 5D is equivalent to using about a 40mm focal length on a rebel or XXD camera, which most people use and are accustom to. It's not really that long a focal length when it's viewed at what it's supposed to be viewed at. Plus FF cameras have less DOF, so a wider aperture is needed to create the same shallow DOF you can get on a crop camera with not so wide an aperture.

bryphotoguy · Jan 31, 2008

fleurya said:
I just didn't get why he was using such a large zoom lens to the photos. Given the setup and the model proximity to the camera, do you really need that lens? I'm guessing a business like Playboy would have an extremely large arsenal of lenses to choose from.

I don't know either. I never saw this episode but a nice fixed lens like an 85mm (gotta love that f1.2 version) or the 135mm f2 would work. f2.8 is fast but with that lens the images won't be as crisp as they could until he's shooting at f5.6.

Village Idiot · Jan 31, 2008

bryphotoguy said:
I don't know either. I never saw this episode but a nice fixed lens like an 85mm (gotta love that f1.2 version) or the 135mm f2 would work. f2.8 is fast but with that lens the images won't be as crisp as they could until he's shooting at f5.6.

The Canon 70-200 f/2.8L USM (no image stabilization) is just as sharp, if not sharper than some of the primes out there. Plus he has the ability to zoom in on the scene.

There's reviews of the 70-200 f/2.8L that say it's just as sharp at f/2.8 at f/5.6