Aaron Dabee
My name is Aaron Dabee. I am a photographer/filmmaker from Mandeville, Jamaica. I have a love for creating content, travelling and exploring. I am also an automotive enthusiast. I started my path in this field in 2015 when I started to get into my short-lived interest in YouTube gaming. I ended up quitting after a couple months, but loved the process of editing videos and just expanded my skill-set from there with the aid of YouTube. I started as a “professional” in mid-2019, shooting cars, models and working with recreation sports companies. Now I aim more at making travel content and digital marketing for companies.
DJ Mac
I took this photo in a garrison, close to where Mac lived. There were tight walkways and old broken down cars around the place. Mac was being sponsored by Monster Energy and wanted some photos, to promote. It was around 3pm, which is one of my favourite shooting times because the sun is not directly pointing down like at noon, but is also giving a strong bright ray which is good for giving rim light for back it shots, without causing a silhouette. In this shot, he sat on the trunk lid of an old scrapped car and looked over at an object on the floor as I directed him. For elements, the smoke coming out of his mouth is actually fake and was added in Photoshop.
Cold-Orange Toned
This shoot was with a model at an apartment complex, that was supposed to be a sunset vibe on the top floor. However, it was raining quite hard and I wanted to just cancel the shoot, but the model was surprisingly still up to shoot in the rain, so we went by the pool and I told her to lie down on the soaking wet “bench” as the rain eased up. I brushed her skin and made the oranges a little more saturated to bring her out from the cold atmosphere while keeping the shadows cold for a contrast.
Holywell
I went up to the Holywell park in November; it was rainy season however, we got blessed with not just rain but extreme rolling fog. As I was putting on my jacket I just decided to take a landscape photo of the fog rolling. In the actual image I could barely see the trees, I had to make a contrasting gradient filter to show it up, then edited it in such a way where it looked mystic and to top it off placing the coordinates in the center giving a cinematic feel.
Beenie Man
As much as I am a “natural light” photographer, I always accept new challenges as a content creator. I had the opportunity to use a Sony A7sii Full-frame mirrorless camera with a cinema lens. The quality and detail from this setup was amazing. It was a simple diffused light facing him and a smaller, less powerful one as a rim light behind him. I like using black and white for situations where I can show highlights in the best situation. In this photo in particular, he was singing a recent song he had made.
Audi Q3
This is a 2020 AUDI Q3, from the Audi Jamaica dealership. A friend (Coy Lyttle) and I went out to Jacks Hill to go shoot this amazing car. It was about midday so I tried to avoid direct sunlight hitting the car. In this photo, it was parked in the middle of this rarely used single lane road and, even tho the car looks to be in motion, the motion was actually added in post-editing, where I also blocked where the driver would sit with a fake shadow since there was no one in the seat at the time. There was also editing done to the lights to control the temperature as it was a bit too blue.
Levitate
I saw a photo on Instagram 2 years back of someone levitating and I knew I had to try it. So, I called my close friend and asked him if he’d be up for it. We went to a street close to where he lived which had fairly low traffic. We got a Red Stripe crate and I asked him to lie back on it and use his abdominal muscles to hold the pose I was going for. It was a soft, August sunset and I wanted to go for an unrealistic vibe, so I used pink hues from the orange-yellow of the sunset highlights, edited out the crate and exposed his body. This shoot actually happened twice as the first time I missed focus. But, 2 weeks later went again to produce this image.
