dani photography : weekly photo challenge

By: dani photography

Sep 06 2010

Tags: earring, eyes, fill, flash, gold, on black, plug, Portrait, Self Portrait, star, strobe, Strobist, tattoo, top light, woman

Category: Photography

3 Comments

I set out to take a whole new direction with my lighting this week. Literally! I realized I had never lit a subject with light from the top.

Inspired by a recent post on www.strobist.com, the blogger detailed how he used a lightweight reflector stand as a mini-boom stand for his flash. For those of you who may not know, a boom stand has an arm designed to hold a light out over a subject, while staying safely out of the shot. While I fully intend to add one to my arsenal as soon as I can, this week’s shoot required some special rigging.

I put my SB-900 flash on a lightstand and raised it all the way to my ceiling, then pointed it down towards the ground. Since my umbrellas wouldn’t work to diffuse the light at that angle, I shot through a large white bounce diffuser. The bounce was balanced precariously, parallel to the ground, on an adjustment knob of the flash’s lightstand, and a second lightstand I used to hold it in place. If you can picture that, it created a cute little fort to crawl under!

I set the camera up on a tripod low to the ground, and kneeled in front of it. Once I got it dialed in, the lighting from above was really nice, but the shadows were pretty dark under my chin and eyes.

So I remembered a technique I saw in a Joe McNally video. On the ground in front of me, I laid out the gold material cover to the bounce. I set a second flash on the floor, aimed at the gold material, to bounce some warm light up into the shadows. The light was really strong, because it was only about a foot away, and the gold material is very powerful at reflecting light, so it was set to the lowest power setting.

Considering this was the first time I have attempted either light option (lighting from above, or bouncing light off gold material) I am really happy with the outcome. I love studio techniques and would love the opportunity to try them out more often. Any takers?

Thanks for looking,
dani