One of the best feelings is getting some really awesome new stuff to play with. On the flip-side of that is having awesome new stuff sitting around that you just haven’t had time to play with yet. The situation for me was the latter in this case.
I had my homemade diffusion panel I was itching to experiment with, the Nikon SB-800 I got for Christmas has only seen some brief use, and, just last week my new Nikon D90 arrived. So I was ready to take some pictures. Luckily for me my photography friend, Eliesha, seems to have an endless supply of cute friends willing to take some of their clothes off and pose for the camera. And to spice it up a little we called up our other photog friend, Jason, and had him come shoot as well. Three photographers, one cute model, should be an interesting Saturday afternoon.
One thing I’ve learned is that the more gear you get, the harder it becomes to haul all of that gear from shoot to shoot. Backpack, lighting bag, two light stands, collapsed diffusion panel, cover for diffusion panel – it all adds up. I hate making multiple trips to the car, especially when it was like 20 F this past weekend. Stupid winter.
So, aside from me bitching about the cold and hauling all my stuff, the shoot went pretty well. Part of it might have been all the mixed drinks our model was putting away to help her relax, but that’s besides the point. Here are a couple of my favorites:
This one was done with my diffusion panel on camera left with Eliesha’s AlienBee B400 at 1/4 power or so. You can see the nice soft light it created on the the right side of Elise (her right). Nice soft transition between light and shadows. I wanted to leave the shadow side a little dark to add a little mystery if you will, so there was no fill flash or reflector or anything. One thing Joe McNally always says is that sometimes light is more about what you don’t light than what you do, so I tried to keep from lighting part of her face to add that drama. I did however want to work with a rim/hair light, so I stuck my new Nikon SB-800 on a stand behind Elise on camera right snooted it to keep the light from flaring into my lens or hitting the background. As you can see this creates some nice separation on her left and highlights her hair nicely.
Here is a setup shot for the above picture:
Time to move it to the bedroom. We were doing all of these shots at Elisha’s house and she just so happens to have a really nice bed, so we decide to take advantage of it. At this point Elise is pretty tipsy, so getting her to take off some clothes wasn’t too hard.
We covered her up with a black shear and just had her lay all over the bed, change positions a lot, and we moved the lights as we were shooting. It was kinda hectic, but I managed to get a few good shoots from it. We left the big studio lights back in the home studio and just used small flashes for these. For this shot, if I remember correctly, I had the Nikon SB-24 right behind me at 1/4 power through a small white umbrella, and then on camera right was the Nikon SB-800 through a medium white umbrella, a little further back.
Gotta love those small strobes. So versatile and easy to use. With just a couple of these guys you can create so many different lighting scenarios its crazy! If you don’t have any, go get some. And try and get out of the studio with them. Balancing ambient with strobe is fun and you can create lots of unique pictures. I know that’s not what I did, but it’s way too freaking cold here, and I promise I will once we have a nice day. Do as I say not as I do!