Saturday’s shoot with Heather went extremely well. She is a posing machine, one of the best I have worked with. We shot both outside at various places in downtown St. Louis and back in the studio. One thing I wanted to do in the studio is work on some specific lighting schemes. I have been getting a lot of advice from Stephen Eastwood who is one of the Canon print masters. I think one of the most important things I learned from him was the importance of grids to control light. Fairly expensive, but worth the cost. For these shots I had a bare bulb flash grided from camera rear right angled down on her. The light was meant to leave just a shadow on the right side of the face. Just left center was a 32×40 grided soft box. Now, even with the grids, I was getting to much spill. I remember Stephen saying he would grid his grids if he could. I couldn’t do that, but what I did do is I cut a strip of black muslim I had and covered up half of the soft box. I almost created a strip box, but the exception was there was still light coming through the muslim. The result was a tight, mid contrasty light effect that almost made her glow. Note I was using a thunder gray background, the light was so tight that I had almost 0 spill! Now that’s control. (Click on photo for a larger view)
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