Lights, Camera, Air Conditioning!
Posted on 16. Jul, 2008 by Terry Reinert in Photography
Once again I converted a room in my house into a mini-studio for a shoot a few days ago. It is a small room but not too bad. Add a queen size bed and a headboard and suddenly you have very little room to move. Not only that, but you have very little room to set up light stands, reflector booms, tripods, assistants, and so forth. What do you get when you pack some studio lighting, a model, an assistant, and a whacked out high energy photographer into a small room? A high energy bill after having to drop the AC to 70F just to keep from sweating my butt of is what! Oh well… I cannot complain… too much…
Anyway, I have a big shoot coming up this weekend that I am using that room for so I wanted to do some homework and make sure I got everything figured out before then. So I called a friend of mine, a model who I have worked with a few times in the past, and had her come over for a shoot. Do you recall the show “Gilligan’s Island”? What was supposed to be a 2 hour shoot turned into a 6 hour shoot! We didn’t even realize it at the time though the fact that my iPod had cycled through at least 5 different albums should have clued me in. Hey, time flies when you’re having fun, right?
So I settled for a minimal lighting set up. I used an Interfit Colorflash 500S with a white reflective umbrella as the main subject light. I set up a Versalight 300 as the background light. I used the Canon Speedlight 580 hot-shoed to the camera to control all the other lights and every now and then I threw in the Canon Speedlight 550 to try out some lighting effects on some shots. I kept the Versalight set to the lowest setting most of the time since it is a small room and I didn’t need too many photons to get a nice even lighting across the background. Every now and then I would boost it up a notch to blow out the background but mainly left it on the lowest setting. The Interfit Colorflash was set according to what I needed for each shot but usually just stayed around 1/2-1/4 power. The hot-shoe flash was bounced off the ceiling or wall depending on the shot that I was trying to get. Again, nothing really fancy or “McNally-ish” about the lighting but a little more than a simple on camera flash.
The only real problems I ran into is dealing with exposure due to metering settings. It didn’t happen all that often but every now and then the metering (or something else) would be off that caused the exposure to be REAL low… as in “the image came out completely black” low. I messed with the metering modes on the camera a bit but it seemed to happen no matter what mode was selected. If I changed my angle slightly, boom, problem solved. But sometimes I really wanted that angle! So after the shoot I busted out my trusty Canon 5D user manual and basically read exactly what I already knew… how each mode works. But that didn’t tell me squat about why I was having problems. The obvious answer is the camera was metering incorrectly due to one of the lights but I haven’t spent the time to figure out which one yet. I’m going to call my buddy Robert Louis Vanelli later today and ask him since he is the best lighting guru that I know. He gets a lot of phone calls and emails about stuff like this from me… and you see how long I can talk about a specific subject in a single email or post… and he reads his emails on his Blackberry… Let’s just say that he probably has nightmares about reading my 30 page emails on a nightly basis! That sound the Blackberry makes when a new email arrives… it must trigger mental break downs when he see’s my name pop up…
That about sums it up for this one. I will be posting some more stuff really soon so keep an eye out for it. Vanelli did a karate photo shoot with myself and the other black belt candidate last weekend and created a bad ass poster to display in the studio and at the test like he does for every test. When I saw what he had done my jaw hit the floor. It is really awesome… I will post it soon along with some other stuff.
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