On designing the look of the “Left 5 Dead” parody photoshoot, with additional renders and behind-the-scenes photos

A double-page update today, with one of our most HDR-friendly locations. I’ve talked before about how the right texture and environment can really do amazing work with tonemapping, and here you see it in action.

In celebration of Valve releasing the Left 4 Dead “Survival Pack” expansion, we’re expanding our photo gallery of Left 5 Dead. Seven new photos have been added to the Flickr gallery, continuing the adventures of the fab four and their zombie-hunting antics. The response of the internet to this side-project has been phenomenal, reactions covering the full spectrum from ecstatic love to the blackest of hate, and we couldn’t be more proud.

Over the course of the six hour photo shoot, we had two HDR cameras, one behind-the-scenes camera (and countless digicams and phones), seven cast members, one makeup artist, two photographers, one production assistant, five zombies, and one director. Between the two principal cameras, 142 HDR shots were taken (426 exposures), consuming 3.9 gigabytes for the raw files alone. From this, 27 captures were rendered into HDR, tonemapped, and layered into finished Night Zero photos, and of those, 17 were chosen for the official Flickr gallery of Left 5 Dead. It’s an incredible amount of work for 17 photos, all done with volunteered time and existing equipment (except the witches fingers and Francis’ vest), and we all hope you’ve enjoyed seeing the results as we had making them.

For the original Left 5 Dead blog post I included some behind-the-scenes photos that showed the whole production from an observers standpoint. Today, I’d like to show you some images from the principal cameras that did not become finished photos. Some were rendered in HDR, but abandoned in favor of more exciting or better framed alternates. Some of these were candidates for HDR, but either too much movement, poor lighting, or an unusual angle stopped them short. Others were used in a two-camera setup, and it just turned out that the other camera got a better frame. A few of them were just used as test shots to get an idea of the framing and light levels before putting the actors into place. And just a couple are the principal photographers doing some of their own behind-the-scenes work.

For those who are curious, the two cameras in use are our regular production rigs, a Canon Rebel XTi (manned by Forest Gibson) and a Nikon D90 (manned by Eli Black-Mizuta).