#2 - 52 Weeks Lit Up

Well I just managed to squeeze in this set up, even if the blog was written this morning! But I'll claim a bit of leeway as we didn't get home until 9pm last night from a very busy weekend following a very busy week (including Lilly's first week at daycare - cue pulled heart-strings!).

So, about the shot...

In the process of spending a very busy weekend away up in the Blue Mountains, we spent a couple of hours visiting our good friends (we had intended to head out and shoot some engagement shots, but the beautiful mid-summer Mountains weather of 14C, mist and rain put paid to that idea). Now Josh is an absolute Pearl Jam tragic and an even bigger Eddie Vedder - as a soloist - tragic (and I have to say I'm a pretty big fan too) and he took great delight in putting on an Eddie Vedder DVD so we could have our tea and chat to the dulcet tones of Society, Guarantee, etc.

So this shot was inspired by that fantastic musician. I have also been teaching myself to play the guitar since receiving one for my birthday last year so I thought I'd include that in the shot and spare all of you from another classic self-portrait of my mug!

Ok; the details:

I wanted to create a shot that mimicked a relaxed concert feel of just a muso and his (I'd say "or her", but with the amount of hair on my arms we're not fooling anyone...) guitar and the most important thing to get right was the warm key light and the overall low-key feel.

But first a note on the composition. As I said, I wanted to spare you guys from another shot of my mug, and wanted to focus on the guitar. I sat on a chair and positioned the camera so it was at about 3 o'clock, pointing at my right shoulder with the neck and head of the guitar still in frame, but leading away from the camera. At first I would try a large appeture to really try and use focus to isolate the guitar and my right hand, but as it would turn out I just couldn't knock enough light down for that...

The key light: this took the form of my speedlight with a yellowy/orange diffuser on a stand set to 1/4 power, infront of and to my left. Next thing I wanted to do was create a rim light come back light so I set up one of my strobes with the umbrella reflector behind me and to my left and set it to minimum power. The last light was another umbrella'd strobe infront of and to my right - just beside the camera - to fill the shadows cast by the speedlight, again set to minimum power.

As I mentioned, I want to use a large appeture to really draw attention to the guitar and to create some nice soft highlights on the pegs and head, but I just couldn't knock enough light down to use such a large appeture...

The two strobes are completely dominating the scene and
the key light is lost...

As you can see in the photo, there is simply no atmosphere with this shot. The lighting is too flat and there is no direction.

In attempting to bring down the light I did try one trick that I had read about a few weeks ago.

Now this does affect how your light behaves, and it's advisable that you turn off your modelling lamp to avoid melting umbrellas or smouldering umbrellas. All you do is collaps the umbrella to a degree (play around with the effect) and this reduces the size of the light source, but also the amount of light coming out. I ended up doing this to both umbrellas so I could maintain useable appeture. (The de-decorated Christmas tree was also removed!).

I also played around with turning the front strobe off, but as you can see in the next image, although better,  overall it's still a little too bright and the back light is certainly too dominating.

With limited room, the only possible way to generate the low-key image I was after was to stop down the lens and while this would increase my depth of field and reduce the focus feel I wanted, it was the better compromise.

By this stage I was getting the key light looking how I wanted
it to, but that backlight was just too strong... Front strobe is
turned off.

Another aspect of the shot which I haven't yet mentioned is the difference in temperature of the two light sources.

A very common practice in stage lighting is to use coloured gels over the back lights, I guess to add some interest and a bit of excitement to the whole experience. Because I don't yet have any gels (nor the means at 11pm to create my own) I had to rely on warming up the speedlight with an orange diffuser so that the strobes would appear to be cooler and thus have a blue cast to them.







With the lighting balance out, the warmth pretty much how I wanted it and the low key feel, the final image delivered what I had set out to create...

The final image. ISO100, 1/200s, f/16, ~100mm

And here is the sketch; I have made leaps and bounds in the advancement of my set-up sketches (although they didn't have a guitar playing subject)...

Ta-daaaaa

Lighting set up. Note that this diagram shows both umbrellas fully open when in reality I had both collapsed to the point where they resembled snoots. Front strobe (beside the camera) was on minimum power, rear strobe was on 1/3 power and the speedlight was on full power. 

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Thanks for reading!!!

Will