day 113 - shifting goals

when i started this shot my thought was i wanted to set up a hard light camera left, have that hitting my cheek/ear, then have something blocking the light from hitting my chin/nose. then set up a reflector camera right to bounce back some soft light.

so my face would be hard light on the left, shadow area, soft light on the right.

it was that shadow separation area that i was most interested in. it seemed like a challenge. so i set up a flash camera left, and clamped a small book (the melancholy death of oyster boy, if you must know) to block errant light from hitting the front of my face. set up the reflector, and it all worked out pretty well.

there's something about having a nice mix of hard and soft light on the subject that i like a lot.

so, that done, i wanted to build up the background a bit. first i gobo'ed the flash to prevent a lot of errant light from going back there. that worked allright, but i was still getting a lot of room bounce from the main flash.

decided some color was a good idea. set up the colorsplash with a slave trigger, and i liked it. but i'm getting a little tired of the just-a-color-gradient on my background. so i started looking around the apartment for something that would cast some cool shadows. i tried a few things before i came across our collander. clamped that in front of the colorsplash flash like this:



and the rest is history.

setup shot:

day 112 - rug background

we have a rug with a pretty cool pattern woven into it. almost a modernist thing going on. i thought it'd make an interesting background.... but didn't want to hang it on the wall. so i put my camera on my boom, and laid underneath it and took this picture. i think it came out well.

setup shot:

day 111 - like hiroshi

this morning i was looking through hiroshi sugimoto's portfolio, and i was struck by how when he photographs the sea he often puts the horizon line exactly across the middle of the picture. which most people who know stuff about photography will tell you not to do. i was thinking about how bisecting the frame like that creates a graphic design component to the photograph that wouldn't otherwise be present, especially in this one, which i think became an album cover for u2.

so i thought i would borrow that idea for this picture.... instead of a horizon line i used the joint where my wall becomes ceiling, and i noticed a bit of reflected highlight on one side, so i put myself under it so it would make a sort of a halo effect. i have no idea what's reflecting up there, i just figured i'd take advantage of it. i kept this one a lot darker than i usually would.... i wanted it to be more about the wall and ceiling, and less about my presence.

setup shot:

day 110 - falling scarf

set up some lights, turn on a fan, toss a scarf in the air, and pull the trigger. it's photography gold, i say. i don't actually say that, by the way. it's just a random thought i had, figured i'd try it out. i chose this particular shot because it reminded me of some cephalopod you'd see waving appendages in the ocean or something.

the light pattern on the wall was a bit tricky.... i wanted to use a white shoot-through umbrella for the big relative size of light source it would give me, but it always has that hard edge where raw light spills past the edge of the umbrella fabric and hits the background.

so, to solve that, i double diffused it. set up the white shoot=through, and then affixed my lumiquest sb-3 to the flash behind the umbrella. so light comes out the flash, goes through the sb-3, then goes on into the umbrella. lost some light doing that, but it created the double shadow/diagonal light gradient across the background that you see there. i thought it was a cool effect, diagonal lines add a feeling of tension, and i dig that in this image.

setup shot:

day 109 - leaning in

this shot is a hardish light source, with a diffusion panel under my face to bounce some of that hardness back up soft-style. add a strobe camera left with a cto gel, and a stobe camera right with a blue/green gel for some color contrast, and that's about it.

setup shot:

day 108 - split toned madness

for this one i was trying for a different look using the same equipment as i did on day 107.... so instead of using the sb-3 as a rim/slash light, i use it here as a camera right main. the silver umbrella still provides dark side lighting, and now the trigrip diffuser is doing more fill than it did last time. i was hoping for a hard/soft tension, but it didn't really emerge.

got bored with the lightroom post processing, so i split toned it. i'm not all that big a fan of the split toning, but i thought i'd play with it anyways.

setup shot:

day 107 - 50mm portrait

today i wanted to try and make a portrait in the studio (living room) with my 50 mm manual focus lens. so this is it. i think it came out well, i was able to get good focus on the eyes, some of her hair and the tip of her nose are out of focus, which is really interesting.

it's still frustrating, dealing with the manual focus. i've got my eye on a 35mm af-s prime lens that will let me autofocus, so i'll probably pick that up this next week, add that to the arsenal.

so yeah. calling this one a success. having a gorgeous model to photograph doesn't hurt.

setup shot: