Studio Lighting Fall 2011 Final Images

Here are the remaining images from the Fall 2011 Studio Lighting class. You already saw one as your Christmas present, the cookies for Santa.  This images is a do-over of an image I did last year. I was happy with the one I did last year but I wanted to make it a bit more edgy. This is my Son Jorden, hes been working out a lot since the summer so doing a shirtless hard light shot seemed to work really well for me.

Here, hes standing a few feet in front of a large black piece of foam core. (how did I survive before I discovered foam core?) The strobes are positioned close on the left and right firing directly at him. I am at iso 160 f32 @ 1/250. The goal was to drop as much light off the background as possible while still lighting his face hard with the strobes.  A little desaturation and noise reduciton finishes the image out.

This next shots pretty simple compared to the last one. All I did here was setup some pieces of the hardwood floor (leftovers from putting in the new floor this summer.) With Jorden’s Shoes and water bottle.  Standard camera settings apply here I’m at iso 100, f5.6 @ 1/125. I set up 2 tripods with a bar between and using a super clamp I attached a single strobe with a medium softbox directly overhead.  I wanted a fairly soft light because I was trying to simulate the light form a gym which would be fairly far from the subject matter here and be casting pretty soft shadows. I used white foam core angled down a bit to try and soften the shadows under the ball and the water bottle.

The story behind this last image is one of stress and burning the candle at both ends. Gnerally I try and avoud fast food, but the wife and I were on the run to and from the SPE West conference at Cabrillo (which one of my images was shown at yay!) and on the way we stopped at McDonalds for a quick bite. While standing in line, I saw a picture similar to this advertising a Happy Meal. I decided to try and recreate the shot as part of my final.  This one is the shot that I am the most proud of believe it or not. iso 100, f11@ 1/125 using 2 strobes and a dizzying array of bounce cards, reflector discs and white foam core went into the creation of this shot. In retrospect I am going to start taking shots of the scene I setup to get this sort of shot, its just crazy sometimes the lengths you go through to get a seemingly simple shot right in the camera. Sure I could have just taken the shot and then fudged it in photoshop but where would the fun and challenge be in that?

As always thanks for listening to me I hope everyone had a safe and happy new year celebration. Coming very soon I will have a big reveal here of the big project the wife and I have been working on. Its all very exciting. Concurrently, with the big reveal will be a facelift of the Tahquechi.com site.

As always, thanks for all the great feedback and comments keep them coming I read each and every one.

Ted