The Fabulous Cuprano

We have an extensive drum collection at the recording studio where I work and we`re always on the lookout for unusual kits that our customers wouldn`t necessarily have access to on their planet.

This kit is made by a small company called EcHo Custom Drums in Manchester, UK. The owner, a gifted coppersmith of 20 years, has a son who`s a gifted drummer. Between the two of them they decided to try making drum kits out of metal and made their name making models from mainly aluminum, and brass. The copper model here is their latest endeavor. Called the Cuprano, it`s made of 1,2 mm thick copper. And though it`s metallic, it has the warmth of sound of a wood kit but with amazing definition and focus.
I won`t bore you with tech details… if you`re a drummer and wanna know more, you only gotta ask :-)

As is usually the case, I was elected to take its portrait for the studio FB page and website. This posed problems as not only was the copper polished and highly reflective, but the surfaces were curved. This meant that using my standard flash set up with two 250W heads with 60 cm soft boxes would give me the dynamic to bring out the stunning finish… but it would also produce burned out areas where the flash reflected straight back through the lens, and there would also be large areas of dark where the relative darkness of the room reflected in the areas curving away from the light source (does this make sense so far?) And to further complicate things, there was so much fine detail in the construction that needed to be faithfully reproduced: the laser lettering on the bass drum rim, the brass logo plates, the intricate chrome hardware and the surface work of the copper.

I solved all those issues by taking an additional shot exposed for the natural light in the room without flash. I then superimposed the lit shot over the non-lit shot in Photoshop and simply erased the parts of the lit shot that were problematic. I was left with a lovely range of copper tones from cool to warm, the dynamic range that makes the kit so visually stunning when you see it for real.
I also added two smaller flashes (each with hot shoe light sensor to trigger them when the main flashes fired) behind the bass drum directed up the rear wall to inject additional dynamic behind the kit and which also reflected a bit off the floor tiles.

Canon EOS 5D MkIII + EF 24-105 L IS, Manual 1/125 sec, f 13, ISO 400
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.