Monday, June 7, 2010

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A little lighting...

... can go a long way.  I am just editing some images from a shoot I did for a friend of mine, who has brainstormed an interesting web-series that should start being filmed later this summer.  Before I went on my three week trip to the southwest, she asked me if I could do some promo shots of her and the other two main actresses.  While my Canon EOS-7D handled the ambient light just fine (it was much brighter in the forest than I had anticipated), there just wasn't enough contrast separating the three ladies from the background.  I had brought some minimal lighting along just in case, and decided to set it up after I saw how flat the contrast was.


Very simple: a Dynalite Uni-400 Head, powered by the Dynalite Jackabbit II Powerpack bouncing into an umbrella on the left, and a Canon 430EXII flash into an umbrella, a fair bit higher up on the right.  Pocket Wizard Plus II transceivers on both, a transceiver on the camera, and away I went.  This was very much a rushed shoot, with a half dozen scenes (with several outfit changes) photographed in under 2 hours.  The lighting certainly could have been tweaked to look even better (I really am not a "lighting guy" by any stretch, as you can probably tell!), but even with this simplistic and rushed setup, you can see how much it can help.

Beau Photo both sells and rents the Dynalite kit I used (the Uni-400 kit with two Jackrabbit batteries rents for $60 per day), as well as the light-stands, umbrellas, Manfrotto Lite-Tite umbrella holders (for the Canon flash), Pocket Wizards and anything else you might need for a light-weight location shoot.  If you need more power, we also rent the new Hensel Porty Lithium strobe kits and the Profoto Pro7B kits, both being higher output battery strobe systems.

This second example only had one light from the left.  The sun was waning but I still wanted a somewhat natural "sunlit" look...

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