Finally got a shot this week that I liked. Nothing like waiting until the last minute. In my defense, I shot two other setups this week for my project, but neither of them turned out good, so I kept trying. Good thing I did because I really like this shot.
Josi can always turn the cuteness up to 11 when she wants to and tonight was no exception.
I wanted to play with some gels and adjusting my white balance since it’s been a while since I’ve had fun with it, plus I wanted to mess around more with the bokeh my 50mm f/1.8 can create, so I tried to cram it all into one shot – I think I did a pretty good job (I say that every week, don’t I?).
For this shot I dropped my white balance down to 3850K, which is getting into the blue realm of color temperature, and then brought Josi back up and added some warmth with a full CTO gel and a 1/2 CTO gel on top of that. That was on my SB-800 in the Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox pretty close on camera left.
The nice thing about working at wide apertures like f/1.8 is that your flashes barely have to work so your recycle times are almost instant, which makes it much easier to capture the moments like this one.
For the rim/separation light I used the SB-600 bare zoomed to 85mm back camera right. I also added a 1/2 and a 1/4 CTB gel – those along with the cool white balance helped to create that nice blue light. I think the white fabric on the Apollo was picking up a little spill from the blue rim light and mixing it in some with the warm key light to give some slight coolness to her skin tones as well. Pretty cool. And I didn’t even plan that!
Here is the setup shot:
Another week done! I’d really like to do a self portrait in a similar setup, but they are so hard to do at f/1.8 – getting the focusing locked in is so hard when you barely have inches to work with. I’ll keep trying though and hopefully I’ll get a good one. It took me 3 shoots this week to get a shot that I really liked and wanted to share, but if that’s what it takes then so be it.
Who knows what next week will bring…