Ever since I got my copy of Joe McNally‘s Hot Shoe Diaries I have wanted to do a shot like he did titled “Creepy-guy-in-the -alley.”  It’s a great shot utilizing the power of multiple flashes and Nikon’s CLS, so now that I have 2 CLS-enabled flashes (SB-800 and SB-600) it was time for me to grab an innocent looking girl, a guy who can cast a mean shadow, and my gear and head downtown. Joe also featured this shot on his blog here.

I knew I wanted to take Joe’s shot and take it further by breaking the shot up into three different shots to try and tell a story, so we will go over each part of the story below.

Before I go into each one here are a few details that stayed the same throughout. The SB-800 was the light creating the shadow around Aaron.  It was zoomed to 105mm the whole time; the only thing that changed was the gel color. The SB-600 was the light for my model, Josi, and it had a 1/4 CTO gel on it to warm it up; the modifier changed throughout the shots though.

Part 1 – The Encounter

The first shot I did was almost a direct copy of Joe’s shot (the shot above): girl looking back, creepy shadow with green gel, etc.  The hardest part about this whole shoot was figuring out how to get the shadow where I wanted it and to get it to be the right size, so I started with that part of the shot first.  I placed Aaron between the wall and the flash and just started shooting and chimping, occasionally messing with the modeling light feature of the SB-800.  I finally settled on back camera right at probably around a 90 degree angle between the camera and flash.  I used a green gel for this one both to duplicate Joe’s shot and also for the first part of the story – I used green, yellow, and red, to match a stoplight, in order to show the severity of Josi’s situation.  The key light was the SB-600 in a Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox camera right.  Here is the setup shot:

Part 2 – The Chase

At this point in the story Josi has realized how much trouble she is in and has started to run for her life.  I used the yellow gel for this one as it correlates with a traffic light indicating a warning.  I had the SB-800 back camera left in order to cast a shadow on the wall and also provide some illumination for Aaron, who is coming out of the shadows to get Josi.  Josi’s light was the SB-600, still in the Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox on camera right.  I had her start next to Aaron and run towards the softbox while I was shooting to try and capture her running.  She really had to try to look scared; usually she had a huge smile on her face while doing this.  Here is the setup shot:

Sorry this one is so blurry, it was my last shot of the night and I barely remembered to grab it.  It’s better than nothing though.

Part 3 – The End

The third and final shot of this week’s Project 52 shot (it’s a 3-for-the-price-of-1 week is the end of the line for Josi.  She’s cornered and there’s no way out.  When I was planning this shoot out I knew this was going to be the hardest one to pull off from a lighting stand point. Creating the red light and shadow around Aaron while still lighting Josi with a warm light was tricky, and I still didn’t get it quite how I wanted it.  I’ll talk about some improvements I’d like to do in a minute.

I had the shadow light just to my right and up high to create the shadow down low and within the frame, which looked great.  But then Josi was really red as well, so I needed to add my second light some how.  I tried booming it overhead be laying it across the dumpster Josi was hiding behind – no dice.  I tried shooting it unmodified on camera right with no luck.  I finally settled on the Lumiquest SBIII right below Aaron and very feathered away to just catch some light on Josi and not contaminate the shadow too much (its already not as dark as I’d like).  It worked ok.  Here is the setup shot:

I also forget to change my ISO back down from 800 from the previous setup shot. :-/

Conclusion

This shoot was really fun to do and I think it came out ok.  It was really cool to mess around with CLS in a multiple flash setup.  It’s super nice to be able to adjust my flashes from the camera and even switch them off to check a particular light without the other one.  I’ll definitely be using it a lot more.  There are a few things I’m going to do differently next time I shoot this (I’ll revisit this shoot later on in my project 52).  First, I’ll have my damsel-in-distress wear something other than black to add some more contrast – this one was my fault as I told her what to wear.  I’ll use a wider lens – the 28mm of my Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 wasn’t quite as wide as I’d like to be for a couple of the shots.  I’ll also pick an alley that gives us more room to work.  As you can see from the setup shots it was pretty tight in there which made it hard to position things correctly and get the angles right.

I’m sure there’s more, but those are 3 big things I noticed before and after the shoot.  It’s a cool concept and idea and I’m glad I tried it.  Joe McNally rocks though, so his is much better.  But, I’m aiming high…

The shot above was actually my second shot, and it’s not the one I ended up submitting for the assignment, so we’ll hold off on talking about that one for now.  The first shot I did is much more…refreshing:

It was 4th of July weekend, so there was plenty of beer around, plus with a name like Bud Light and a food assignment for a lighting blog it was a perfect match.  I got the basic idea from Strobist a while back when David did a post of food lighting.  My goal was to take a clear bowl and fill it with ice/water and light it from below to create some nice, glowing light, and then also light beer to make it look extra refreshing.  I don’t know about you, but it makes me thirsty.  In fact, I think I might go grab one right now…

*runs to the kitchen*

… ok.  I’m back.  Miss me?  I knew you would.  So let’s talk technical.  This was a 3-light setup.  I had originally only planned on using 2, but couldn’t pull off the look that I wanted with 2, so I had to add my 3rd flash. But before we get into the specifics for the lighting setup, let’s talk about the camera for a few minutes.

Most food/drink photography is done with a pretty shallow depth-of-field, and that was my plan for this shot.  So I set my camera to f/2.8 and 1/125 (because to use my Cactus triggers reliably I can’t sync at my max of 1/200) to kill all the ambient.  I usually shoot at ISO 200 because that’s what my Nikon D90 is optimized for, but I dropped all the way down to ISO 100 for this shot since I knew working so close at f/2.8 I wouldn’t need much flash power.

Well, that wasn’t enough.  All my lights at their lowest settings were STILL too bright.  Time to improvise.  Back to the details.

I started by getting the lighting on the ice right, which took two lights.  The main light for the ice was my Vivitar 285HV at 1/16 power about a foot away away.  I also stuck 2 sheets of printer paper in front of it to knock it down some more.  This worked pretty well to light up the front of the bowl and the ice.

Time for the back.  I used the Nikon SB-800 at 1/64 power and also with 2 sheets of paper to diffuse and drop it down more.  It was much closer to the bowl and also angled up a lot more to not only light the bowl, but also provide the backlight for the beer to help lighten it up and separate it from the background.  Worked out pretty well.

All that’s left is to provide some front fill.  For that it was the Nikon SB-24 at 1/16 power through the Lumiquest SBIII and once again with the 2 sheets of paper to knock it down some more.  Josi was a great help by acting as a V.A.L. for this light leaving me to lay at weird angles on the floor trying to get the right composition.  One last little thing I want to mention about this shot is the use of a water bottle to spray some water drops onto the bottles to give them just a little bit more of that refreshing look and feel.  Mmmm, might be time for another beer…

Here is the setup shot for the Bud (Light)^3 (as I’m calling it) shot:

Ok, time for the Cookie Monster.  God that thing is delicious.  It’s one of the desserts you can get from Cheddar’s and I highly recommend it. Josi and I went in for dinner and with plans to shoot this bad boy.  They bring this freshly baked cookie out with ice cream on it, so it’s melting fast, so we wouldn’t have time to mess with lights, we had to have it right ahead of time.  I asked the waitress if she could bring me an empty skillet to experiment with ahead of time and she was kind enough to help.

Now, if you’ve never taken your camera and lighting gear into a busy restaurant, get ready for some stares and questions.  Everyone was looking at me and I had several people ask what I was doing.  Kinda made me feel important hehe.  Anyway, the setup for this one was much simpler, mostly because I didn’t want to bring all my lighting gear into the restaurant and I wanted to work light and quick.

This one was just one flash, the SB-800 and the pop-up on my D90 as a Commander and fill. I dropped to ISO 100 again and had both flashes on their lowest setting (1/128 power) and with f/5.6 this gave me pretty close to the right exposure.  Once again the SB-800 was in the SBIII which works great close up like this.  The D90 pop-up provided a nice little fill and helped highlight the orange-ness of the table.  I snapped a few shots and then Josi and I devoured this thing.  Sooooo good.  Both the shot and eating it…

Samantha

Samantha is the step-mom of my photog friend Jason‘s kids’ classmate.  Tough to follow?  Yeah, it’s hard for me to explain too.  But anyway, he met her, she’s modeled before, so we setup a time for Jason and I to go out and shoot her one afternoon.  Jason wanted to head downtown and do some comparisons of my lighting gear to his, so that’s what we did.

The first stop was these cool blue doors in one of the alleyways here in Springfield.  I’ve shot on these before and they work great, so it was pretty easy to knock out some shots there.

Great smile, nice breeze.  Easy shot.  Shot with my Nikon SB-800 in my Westcott Apollo 28″ Softbox.  We were using Cactus triggers since Jason shoots Olympus (for now…I think he wants to switch to Nikon, mwahahaha).  It would have been just as easy, if not easier with CLS.

We walked around and did some more shooting until we finally ended at this awesome blue building down by Jordan Valley Park.  I’d seen it before but never really thought about shooting there.  Now it’s going to be one of my go-to locations for nice, contrasty shots (as you’ll see later).  The blue garage door works great with someone wearing yellow.

Unfortunately Samantha wasn’t wearing yellow, but the purple work nice with the door none-the-less.  This was another one light shot, either with my Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox or with Jason’s Alzo 15″ softbox; I can’t remember.  It was in close, right out of frame on camera left.  Either one would produce that nice soft light with the specular behind the model at that distance.  That’s a trick I picked up from, yup, you guessed it, David Hobby over at Strobist.  Nice little trick for using speculars to your advantage when shooting against a reflective surface.

Kristen

This one is easier to follow: she’s the friend of Aaron, one of my co-workers.  He’s mentioned that she’s also modeled before and she’s also pretty cute, which works great for my summer/cute theme we are going with in the post, so I texted her and set up this shoot.  Being super excited about my new blue building location, I wanted to go back there with someone with a yellow dress and sure enough, Kristen was happy to help.

The yellow and the blue really create a nice look.  Kristen’s great smile and pose help a lot too.  I left the specular of to the side of this one, just because I could.  Lit with the Apollo softbox and my SB-800.  Triggered via CLS this time, though.

Ok, so we’ve done a lot of blue.  3 shots in one post on blue.  I’m tired of blue, for now, so let’s move on to the last shot I want to share.  This one is much different from the 3 above – more dark/edgy/urban.  I’ve been looking (unsuccessfully) for an abandon warehouse setting around here that I could use for a photo shoot, but I found something close enough that with the right lighting could fake it pretty well.

In the corner of the parking garage right by the park we were shooting at there is this little cluster of controls, pipes, etc. that I figured with the right light could really create the look I was going for.  So that’s what I set out to do.

This one was slightly more difficult to pull off, but I think it was well worth the effort.  For the backlight I used a Vivitar 285HV on 1/16 power through a bright red gel to create that red, factory-like look on the background.  I wanted Kristen to look warmer, like there might be some kind of boiler or something close by, so I gelled the SB-800 with either 1/4 or 1/2 cut of CTO and stuck it back inside the Apollo softbox and feathered it away from here slightly to keep the light soft, yet edgy, while controlling the spill on the background.  I think it turned out well.  I hope to do many more shots like this in the future.

That’s it for now.  Stay tuned for more summer shots, plus I’m also working on the 2nd assignment for Strobist Boot Camp 2, so there will be a post for that soon.

First thing, I sold my camera and bought a new (well, different) one.  I was using a Canon Digitel Rebel XTI, which was good, but I realized some shortcomings I couldn’t let go by.  Mostly it was the inability for any Canon body to do rear-curtain sync with a manual, off-camera flash.  Not a huge deal, but I’ve got some long exposure shots that I’d like to do and need that ability.  The second reason for the switch was flashes; Nikon is clearly ahead of Canon when it comes to flashes.  And that Nikon CLS is awesome.  So, I grabbed a slightly used Nikon D70s off of eBay for a decent price.  It came with the Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 lens, which is a good lens, so I’m just out my 50mm f/1.8 that I had with my Canon.  The Nikon equivalent is only about $100 at Amazon, so it’ll be mine down the road (probably after Christmas).  I lost 4 megapixels and some quality at higher ISOs, but I gained a 1/500 flash sync, access to CLS, built-in Commander mode for Nikon strobes, better camera controls, and I can now start investing in Nikon lenses and flashes and just upgrade bodies down the line, likely to a D200 or D300.

As far as projects going on, here are some things I’ve done in the past month.  I did a senior portrait session for one of my bosses’ daughter; I shot a wedding for one of my friends with the help of one of my other photography friends; and I shot some maternity portraits along with two of my photography buddies to get some exposure to that.  I bolded each of those because each one should be expanded upon in it’s own post soon.  I also want to do a post about messing around at work.  So, there are four posts I’d like to make in the near future, so watch for those.

I’ll have a little over a week off from work for Christmas; I’ll be going home to Colorado so that should give me time to shoot, write, and relax.  It’ll be a nice break.  And who knows what Santa is going to bring me (I’m pretty sure it’s a Nikon SB-800 though, yay!).

That’s it for now!