At the SDA event I spoke about in my last post, A Dios Sea La Gloria, I had an interesting task handed to me. “You’re a photographer…we need you to photograph…a lot of people…quickly!” Yeah yeah, sounds normal and routine, I know! So, we need a studio look, in the middle of a giant hall filled with people. The walls just weren’t doing it for me. A quick look backstage revealed a bunch of curtains. Perfect! Pull out a 60″ softlighter, small shoot through umbrella, 5 minutes and we have a key and fill against curtains….BORING!
I did some testings and rim lights just weren’t doing it for me either. Then again, I could have done that and cut everyone out and pasted them into some beautiful island backdrop! …or maybe not… I threw a 430ex onto the background and viola! It turned a boring black background into a cool gradient with patterns and lines! It actually looked pretty cool against the red robes to be photographed! Up top is a photo of Felix. He was working with sound and video crews. Very cool dude, especially for letting me take a shot of him here! I don’t think he was nearly as excited as he looks when I called him over for this quick portrait!
Here is an unedited picture of the three lights.
You can see the lighting setup in this photo. The painters tape is only so people would see where the tripod legs were. There wasn’t too much light to begin width and people were moving fast! 1/4 on key and fill, 1/2 power on the background.
Great work – especially in that amount of time. Thanks for the lighting explanation as well!