alittlenews

Now that I have your attention… What a great job that allows so much flexibility. You may be shooting a traffic accident, a ball game, a city government meeting, a chicken house, or you might be shooting a piece on a romance novelist. I had an assignment last week to do just that. Now how cool is that?

Lynn Raye Harris is a novice novelist, okay, I just had to say that. She is actually an accomplished writer with published work but she has not yet been published as a novelist. Our story was based upon her recently winning a contest sponsored by Harlequin. I went to the assignment not knowing anything more than where she lived and that she was a romance novelist. Not much to go on. Fortunately, she was very easy to work with and she was fascinated by the photographic process. So basically I went in with a blank slate. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to do a “romantic” portrait if she was at all a candidate for that treatment. That is a nice way of saying I would shoot a romantic portrait if she was not an old hag wearing the pink feather boa and the fru fru pink house shoes with the fuzzy rings around the top. I know, enough of the stereotyping already!

Fortunately, Lynn was not an old hag and she was very agreeable to doing any kind of photo we could dream up. We began the shoot attempting a romantic portrait. My lighting set up was a basic three light set with a bit of a twist. I had an octobank that I had borrowed from my friend David Higginbotham and I used it for my main light. The octobank is a large, soft light source that is amazing. I mounted a Lumedyne 200ws head in the octobank and we started with it very, very close to Lynn. Keep in mind that the closer a light source is to your subject, the softer it will appear and the octobank is a double diffused light modifier so it is really soft when used up close. I also used another Lumedyne head with a snoot for a hair light.

I was shooting at about f11 so the ambient light was essentially nil leaving me with nothing but darkness in the background. This was a mixed blessing because I was able to use that darkness in another photo but it killed me on this one. To cure the problem, I took an SB800 and set it on the mantle behind her and aimed it down on about 1/4 power to give me a little fill. This created the specular highlight behind her and added to the rim lighting. Now the snooted Lumedyne was not getting it done so I took off the snoot and added a red gel. Actually, I did not have a red gel so I borrowed a kitchen hand towel from Lynn and draped it over the second Lumedyne and moved it very close behind her. The towel was thick and really knocked down the strobe. This gave me a soft red fill light completing the first photo.

While Lynn was being interviewed for our story, I moved the octobank to a position exactly beside one of the windows in her living room and jacked up the power and raised the light stand to about 8 feet. This approximated the window lighting but with enough power to shoot with. I used the other Lumedyne as a bounce light off the ceiling and set it in the adjacent kitchen to provide some secondary fill. This also mimicked the direction of some available light. This set up allowed me to accomplish the second photo.

Now, I still wanted something of a more sensual, dramatic quality if I could. Remember the darkness I had to overcome in the first photo? I used that here to my advantage. I turned off the second Lumedyne and just used the one in the octobank and shot in profile against the dark mantle. Now I had a rim lighting effect by doing nothing but shooting in profile against a dark background. The octobank did all the work. I just tuned my exposure a bit to get the rim lighting like I wanted it and then waited for the right moment. I had several photos where she leaned forward and brought her chin up giving me a somewhat sensual look without being over the top. Since I was not posing this part of the shoot, I just watched while she was talking and noticed that she would do this from time to time when she was either thinking about something or talking about something that she was really into.

I shot all these photos with a Canon EOS 5D and either the 24-70 or 70-200. The strobes were fired with Pocket Wizards. The octobank is not something I am going to use frequently. It takes several minutes to assemble the thing and it is bulky and it is not appropriate for every situation but man, where it is appropriate it really is nice. Unfortunately, I have to give it back to Dave someday. Hopefully Lynn gets published soon and she hires me to take her photo for the book jacket and we both get filthy rich! Right! Well, here’s hoping anyway and good luck to Lynn on her novel.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.