Tequila Sunrise

The studio where I work has a big instrument backline that we have available to our recording customers at no extra cost. Which is especially cool as it enables young musicians and bands to play on top class gear which they often don’t have access to.

One of my jobs is to keep an eye out for good deals in the vintage instrument market and find the best way to get them in our collection. So I was a bit embarrassed when the 12 year old son of a producer who’s been working with us on a project rocks up with his iPad and shows me a drum kit for sale that we’d been looking for for years.
It’s a Ludwig Vistalite “Tequila Sunrise” model made with bands of colored plexiglass from 1973. They’re not all that rare, but to find one in mint condition at a price that fits our budget doesn’t come along very often.
So as the kid’s dad declined getting it for him for his birthday (I honestly felt sorry for him), I called the seller in the UK and we made the deal for the studio. I drove over with my wife on the Eurotunnel to fetch it and once I got it set up in our backline room at the studio (cymbals, hi hat and snare were added from our existing collection), I was blown away at just how pristine it was for a 42 year old kit… it looked barely used !

Another part of my job is to take pictures of the stuff we buy for our website and FB page. I use a pretty standard set up with 2 main flash units with 60 cm soft boxes left and right, slightly oblique, triggered from my 5D on a Uni-Loc (Benbo style) tripod. But in this case I needed to bring out the true dynamic of the colored plexi so it needed something more…

I used an additional two small flash guns from previous cameras, each with a hot shoe fitting light sensor that triggers when the main flashes fire. I placed one of these against the rear wall to light it and reflect light through the kit, the other on its back under the two floor toms to shoot upwards through the clear heads.
There were problems though. There was no way to avoid unwanted reflections, for example under the cymbals and on some of the chrome stands. So I shot both with and without the small flashes and merged the best of 4 individual shots to get the result posted here. The small remote flashes were obviously visible in the image so I cloned them out in Photoshop.

Canon EOS 5D MkIII + EF 24-105 L IS, Manual 1/125 sec, f 11, ISO 100.
Uni-Loc tripod with Novoflex ball head.
2 x Elinchrom 250 watt flash heads with portable 60 cm soft boxes sync’d to camera set at full power.
2 x remote Canon flash heads with light trigger hot shoe fittings.