One of the characteristics of human behavior I find most interesting is the way people think and reason in certain situations. I'm very curious about other's decision-making processes and fascinated by how and why they choose to act in various situations. This is probably the primary reason why I find talking about gear and technique so fundamentally unstimulating. However there are times when I'm working that I feel I have a sudden insight or epiphany that is worth talking about. This is one of those times.
I occupy a live/work loft space in the Old Rainier Brewery building in Seattle's SODO neighborhood. Every three months we have an art walk where we open the building and our spaces to the public. Along with opening my doors and displaying my work, I usually have a set up and and I take portraits of willing guests during the evening. As the date for the last Art Walk approached I was considering what kind of portraits I would take. I decided that I would forgo the dark and moody feeling that I had been shooting at the time for something lively and energetic. I chose to shoot something similar to some portraits I made at one of the Seattle Flickr groups Garage Shoot Meetups a few years ago. I really wanted the Art Walk portrait experience to be entertaining and fun for my guests.
The Art Walk was scheduled to start at six p.m. It was five thirty and I still had to set up the lights. I figured I would use the same setup as before: a beauty dish up high in front, a ringflash from the camera position, two rim lights (bare strobes) from behind and a background light. I decided to go with strip lights for the rims (for a smoother, softer, silkier rim). I started placing stands in position. One for the back left rim, then the back right rim, then the background. The beauty dish would be on a boom overhead in front so I put the boom on a stand and set it in position in front of the posing stool. I put the ringflash on the camera and set it up on the tripod. After all the stands were in their rough positions I mounted the strobes and connected the power cords and pocket wizards. I was in the in the middle of a mental juggling act. I was paying mind to where things were set up, what I was doing, and what still had to be done -- was everything connected to the right place and set on the same channel, were the cords out of the way, was it going to look alright, I had waited too long, the snack table still needs to be set up and food put out. I was desperately hoping that it would all work out. It had been two or more years since I last shot this kind of setup. All of this was swirling around in my head when suddenly for no reason known to me I looked over at the wall behind the camera and thought "I should put my 7ft. parabolic there." I didn't really have time to question my reasoning. I just followed my instinct and added another strobe with the 7ft parabolic and finished the setup.
I asked my neighbor to sit for me so I could fine tune the lights. Once I got everything ironed out -- triggers turned on and tuned to the same channel the strobes in the O.N. position, basically all the bugs ironed out -- this is what turned out:
I couldn't believe it. I had thrown a hail Mary pass and it turned into a touchdown.
To this day I'm not exactly sure why it worked. I just count my lucky stars that whatever circuitry that fired in my brain while I was stressed out and running around like a wild man made the right decision and that I trusted this instinct. If pressed I would say that I the reason the images have such a sculpted 3D look is that all the light is relatively harsh (but not too harsh) and somewhat specular. Add to this, using three front lights I was able to build the light in layers in such a way that avoided a flat look. The other cool thing is that these images looked just about perfect as they rolled off the camera. There is very little retouching to them.
Here are a couple more images from the shoot:
Here is the lighting setup:
I
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