Ahh Journey.  One of the greatest bands ever.  Every time I hear Don’t Stop Believin’ it gets me pumped.  While listening to it last week I got the idea to do a shot involving, well, street lights and people.  I wanted to mess around with my 50mm f/1.8 lens after seeing some of the great shots Dustin Diaz gets with his 50mm f/1.4.  I wanted to try using it at night at f/1.8 to get the really dreamy, blurry, glowing backgrounds and then adding just a touch of light with flash to bring out the subject.

My first attempt was a self-portrait that I shot earlier this week after I finished up a senior session downtown as the sun was going down.  Well, there were several problems with that.  First, it’s pretty difficult to get sharp focus on yourself at f/1.8 –  there is no room for error.  So I shot myself many times trying to get a decent one.  Also, I was nervous setting up all my gear downtown and trying to get a decent self-portrait.  Here are the results:

Not so great.  I also set up myself in a spot that had some ambient light so that bled onto my face along with the flash.  I was also trying to mess with the color and shoot in a bluer white balance with a warm gel to get some interesting colors.  And the backlight is way too strong.  Lots of problems with this shot.  It just wasn’t doing it for me, even with all of the Photoshoping I did.  The one thing I do like about it is the lights in the background from the wide aperture of f/1.8.  Very round and pretty.  The shutter speed here was slow (1/40 sec.) but still fast enough to not cause too much ghosting with the lights.

Tonight’s shot (the one at the beginning of the post) was different.  Since there aren’t too many street lights around my house I had to rely on a slower shutter speed (1/3 sec.) to let the few that are there to bleed in more and create an interesting background.  It was just shot in my back yard, so there wasn’t much to work with, but Josi turned on the cuteness that really made this shot.  I stole borrowed another play from Joe McNally‘s playbook and had Josi throw on one of my hoodies and lit her with a 43″ reversible umbrella with half of the backing removed to only light her face and fall off softly.  I also threw a 1/2 CTO gel on there to warm her skin up some.

Here is the setup shot for the shot of Josi:

Featuring my roommate’s husky pup, Sylar!  I forgot to get a setup shot for my portrait.  I was getting frustrated with trying to get a self portrait downtown and I was still nervous about being along with all my gear, so I bailed before I remembered to grab the setup shot.  I’ll have to work on that.  The setup is described fairly well on the Flickr page for that shot, so check it out if you’re interested.

That’s it for this week.  Still working on ideas for my next Project 52 shot…

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…