So yesterday I had an outdoor photo shoot with my good friend Duke. Duke has one of those faces that just seems to be so dynamic and interesting. Most of the photos that were my favorite of the murder mystery dinner were Duke, so I thought it would be good to bring him out and do a shoot with him. They turned out well (I think, I just started editing them), but this blog is going to talk about what happened after the shoot. You see, Duke is living with this guy who does photography named Brian Gee (
Click here to see some of his stuff) He let me borrow his 70-200mm 2.8/f lens for the shoot with Duke and after we were just kind of sitting there talking about design points of photography. We focused in more on lighting when Brian said, "Do you want to set up some and do a shoot here real fast?" Of course Brian, of course.
So we got to work. we pulled out his backdrops and 4 primary lights. Because I've seen some incredible things that people have done with natural lighting I assumed that actual photo lights weren't as important. I was dead wrong. After about 45 minutes of setting up this is what Brian's living room looked like.
Normally the lighting would've been set up a bit differently but Brian wanted to try something new. so we tried a bunch of stuff. Most of the photo's I'm about to show with captions are straight off my camera to give you an idea of how the lighting worked. I'm going to call that umbrella light "1", the one near Duke's face closest to the camera "2", and the farthest light "3".
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| This is a head on photo with all the lights on. We used a wireless transmitter to make sure that all the lights fired at the same time. |
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| A more serious Duke, same lighting as the one above. |
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| Duke with light 2 off, Light 1 and 3 still on normally |
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| Lights 1 and 2 off. You can see how the hair on Duke's head is a little more shaded than the one above |
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| Light 2 is back on, but not as strong as the first set of shots, light 1 is still off |
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| A closer shot on the same settings as above |
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| You'll get to know this, I love the half face shots. |
It was a fantastic time, and Brian was incredibly helpful. He has all of this lighting stuff in his basement, and he was super gracious to let me play around with his stuff. You should go check out some of his stuff at his site linked above. I'm becoming more and more fascinated with lighting shots too, I'll write more when I've found out more.
~Josh
