Blair Bunting had all of three days to play around with his new Profoto B1 lights before he set out to photograph that awesome parallax Superbowl commercial for National Bank of Arizona. In case you missed it, you can watch it at the bottom of the post, but first, you can take a look at how he captured the ultra high definition moving photos in the 12-minute long behind the scenes clip he just posted over on Vimeo.

Bunting calls the gorgeous technique parallax, a term he borrowed and explains like this:

“What is parallax? Think of when you were in grade school and you had to do one of those cheesy plays…there is always a part in that play where some kid is on a boat made of a tricycle and cardboard, and they are in the rough ocean. In order to create this imaginary ocean in the elementary school cafeteria, they use whats called parallax. This is where they have on set of blue waves on a stick in front of the kid and one behind. The movement of these waves back and forth creates in your mind the idea of the ocean.”

To pull this off, he called on his Nikon D4s‘s burst mode and the wicked fast high speed sync capabilities of the B1 flash units. Check it out:[Read More…]