Sunday, February 28, 2010

365/57 The road to hell begins with ...

365/57 The road to hell begins with ...

"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."

Oscar Wilde


Another evening of boredom leads to a new self-portrait. Wanted something a bit risque and outrageous this time. What better way to do this than grab a book on bondage and a pile of rope. Imagine the things you could do! The risk! The reward! The ... things you learn while surfing the internet.

This was one of my more complex light setups, mostly stemming from the need to get the book cover well lit. Three lights in total here. One SB-900 into a collapsed silver umbrella to camera left, up high and about 45 degrees off center. One SB-900 to camera right, covered with a short, blackwrap snoot and a red gel. I had it popping through some cabling to create a cookie for the background. Finally, to give enough fill on the book, I had the Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe setup with a third SB-800. This was placed on the floor and behind the camera about 10 feet away.

Why?

When I'm shooting with three lights on CLS, I don't have enough channel spots on the camera's built-in commander mode to handle all three. I ended up putting both the umbrella light and the softbox light on Channel A to share the same power level, but had to pull the softbox back to get the power to drop. It's that whole distance vs. light strength working for me here.

Once I got everything set up the way I liked, I handed the camera over to MJ to actually do the shot because I couldn't easily do the intervalometer this time AND get into the scene with the rope draped appropriately across me before the interval stopped.

As for the face? Like I said, you learn some new and interesting things from the internet. Go figure?

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