Here is a picture of my friend Shandana. She was kind enough to model for my mad scientist lighting experiments. You might have seen her driving the car in my last post on the Slow shutter post. She was increbly patient with me, while i was setting up and tinkering with my flash exposures.. Thank you Shandana. Couldn’t have done this without you… :)

I know I still havent posted pictures from the camera rig that i put together for the car shoot. I promise I will post that very soon. Look for an update!

Well, Its time for some strobist info. I absolutely love the lighting on this one. The lighting on the face and the body comes from two different sources. Of course there is an area that overlaps, which adds to the creamy lighting affect an a smooth fall off.

This was shot taken around 1:00 am in the morning. We had just gotten back from the car shoot and were pretty tired. I had been running next to the car with a wireless trigger, so i was completely out of it.

Since it was late night/early morning, I was not exactly trying to over power the sun on this one. I shot this at 1/250th to get rid of any ambient lights that i thought would contribute to the exposure. There were few dimly lit light bulbs in the background which were taken care of by the 1/250th shutter speed.

Like I mentioned before, I was using two lights for this, both SB-800s for the shot. The first one was mounted on a 43″ Westcott convertible shoot through umbrella (half of the black umbrella skirt was taken off to control the spill); positioned just above and very slightly in front of my friends head. You’ll get a pretty good idea about the position if you look at the shadows under the knees. Since this was a shoot through umbrella, and my friend was sitting on the floor; i didn’t need a bigger light source as i was trying to light a pretty small area with the flash. My friends husband Miguel agreed to be my VAB (Voice Activated Boom). Even with his banged up knee from the rugby game, he was incredibly willing to help. Thanks Miguel! Really appreciate it!.

The second was attached with an Orbis Ring Light (about 5-6 feet away), which was acting as the on-axis fill for the body and overlapping on the face. Orbis does a great job as a fill light, rather than a primary light source. Of course if you are looking for a pure ring light effect, then you can always use the Orbis for that. To tell you the truth , I have been using the Orbis as a key light for a while, but it wasn’t until I sat down with David Hobby (strobist.blogspot.com) at the Gulf Photo Plus (www.gulfphotoplus.com) in Dubai that i truly understood the potential of Orbis as an on-axis camera fill light. We were going through his falcon shots from his trip to the desert and he was kind enough to explain how he managed to get such a creamy lighting effect. So thank you David.

I shot this using my Nikon D700 with a Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8. The flashes were triggered using the on camera flash’s commander mode. I had been getting some blurry shots in the beginning of the shoot and i just wanted to make sure i got everything in focus. It was late, we were both tired (It was 1:00 am remember? ) and i wanted to make a few good exposures so i decided to really up my F Stop and go with F/13, Flash power on both flashes was 1/1. Then I just played with the Orbis Flash – Subject distance to get the effect i wanted to achieve. The green grass was also lit up by both the flashes.

I use Adobe Lightoom 2.3 for my post-processing (PP). Since i shoot in RAW, every single image that comes out of my camera requires PP. I pushed up the contrast, and increased the vibrance on the image. The contrast helped darken the already dark areas, which gave the image a pretty cool light fall off, and the vibrance really brought out the color in the grass.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this setup/photo, so feel free to leave a comment.