Big portrait, little equipment, a how-to.

So I flew out of the country to shoot this wedding, and just before the wedding it started pouring.  I was looking for an ark out of the corner of my eye the whole time.  It looked like we wouldn’t get any portraits outside that evening, though eventually we’d have about 5 minutes of a glorious sunset that we didn’t know was going to happen.  I had no choice but to make best use of the space they were in.  The best room there was really just a big empty room with two brightly painted walls with some glass art mounted in some sort of fancy installment fashion.

Flying out of the country meant basically two SB28 flashes at my disposal.  Below is a photo of this wall.  The lighting is courtesy of the gallery, some cans aimed to kind of give this install some interest.  I knew I had to make some awesome stuff here because, well, the only other rooms were packed solid with guests and it was buckets outside.

As you get away from the wall, it’s very very dark.  No other lighting was in this room.  Advantage: Photographer.  I had the perfect environment to do whatever I wanted, so out came a camera flash.  The challenge here, though, is controlling that light.  If you just take a flash out and fire it, no matter how you aim it, it’s going to splatter the whole area with big ugly camera flash light.  Unless you’re Weegee, forget it.

So these camera flashes make it really easy to control the angle of light exiting that fresnel.  Just hit a button a few times, and blamo, a concentrated beam of light you can really use in this situation.  Remember, a shotgun makes a big ole’ mess, but a rifle, well, there you go.  I think I had this flash zoomed to a mid-tele range, just enough that I could cover Jen and no more.  Again, I despise messing around in Photoshop (or anything else) burning and dodging and fixing sloppiness, especially when there’s no reason for it.

I did not, however, want big ole’ shadows on the wall.  I flew internationally, so I was really light on equipment.  To get around this, I used an RTG.  They are really handy and there’s almost always one around.  What?  Oh yeah, RTG = Really Tall Groomsman.  So it was his job to get that thing way up so the shadows fell very quickly behind this setup.  I did bring Jen out from the wall enough that this wasn’t too much a problem and also to put her in heavy shadow so I’d have independent control of my light on her as well as the background light.

With her in complete shadow, I could change my shutter speed, flash power, anything I wanted really without affecting each other, which is an amazing amount of control you can’t always get.  It allowed me to get just the shot I wanted.  The bonus of her reflection in the polished concrete gives the shot a lot of depth.  Shooting low really emphasizes this.  See how hard the light is without being totally obnoxious?  Getting that light off camera axis gets you a lot more flexibility.  Her pose is very much because of the limitation of where the light is coming from given the situation, but I think it turned out pretty nice!  There it is, straight out of Lightroom.

On the wall perpendicular this one was a blue wall with all this glass art in a very rigid pattern.  This was perfect for this kind of shot.  I knew the glass would throw some wicked shadows if I lit it right.  I had someone just hold that flash straight up from the floor back toward the wall a bit so I could get those shadows and to put the hot spot right where I wanted it, again because of the ability to adjust the flash zoom.

So there you have it!  Two great portrait setups out of a fairly ordinary situation!  I wish I’d have shot the room as it looks without any extra lighting.  Then you can see how much a little technique can really dress up a room fast.  Oh well, next time!