I realize that when you see a shot without seeing the setup, it can be hard to visualize how it was done. So here's a diagram to show how the lighting was set up for the Anadarko Industries employee photos (example below).
The camera was about 15 feet from the subject, set to 70mm with a shutter speed of 1/250th to kill the ambient. Aperture was set to 6.3 to throw that background a little out of focus. This also let me choose a low power on the flashes to use less juice and recycle quickly.
The key light was a Canon 430EX set to 1/4 power, and shooting through a translucent umbrella. I feathered the light forward to soften it and direct a good portion of the light across the subject and onto the reflector.
The gold reflector bounced the light back into the shadow areas and warmed it up, giving the subjects a nice glow.
The background light was a Vivitar 285HV, set to 1/16th power and zoomed out all the way to give a tight light pattern. I was up about 8 feet off the ground, and placed about 6 inches from the wall. The light was pointing down at about 45 degrees. This made the light sort of "skip" or "scrape" down that wall, adding lots of shadow to the rugged stone. Had I pointed the light straight at the wall from a distance, it would have come out looking flat and lack interest and shadow.picked
This was a very quick throw together shot. I got to the hotel about ten minutes before the employees, picked the spot in about a minute, and threw everything up in a hurry. Two test shots to get the lighting nailed and I was off and running. Bang bang bang, 30 people in about ten minutes.
It was fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment