Closet II

So I was walking home from the grocery store today when, because I'm a big dork, I started thinking about last night's closet shot and wondering how I could recreate it in the daytime. I wanted to make it look like the closet and the outside room were filled with natural daylight, even though in reality the only window is the one behind my head.

I wanted the view from the window exposed properly, so I found those settings, then began to play with the flash I have inside the closet. The most natural-looking light dispersion occurred when I lowered the diffuser on the flash and set it close to the upper corner of the closet (my right; camera left). I got the power levels right, but found the light looked just a little too blue for me, so I decided to gel it to make it slightly warmer. 1/4 CTO was too orange; even 1/8 was a little too much. But I remembered David Hobby mentioning that you could always put a gel only halfway over your flash to dilute the effect, so that's what I did, in effect creating 1/16 CTO and getting the color, as Goldilocks said, juuuuust right.

The last step was illuminating the wall outside the closet. This was the easiest part; I bounced a second flash off of a white "reflector" (read: piece of foam core) and onto the wall, blocking the camera-right side with another piece of foam core to keep that flash out of the closet and avoid over-lighting myself. I had to crank up the power a bit on this flash, but after a couple of tweaks I got a level I was happy with there, too.

All in all this took maybe 15 minutes (including scrounging around trying to figure out where I had left my second flash), and I got a result I'm very happy with. Now, to be disciplined not-lazy enough to keep practicing my lighting on a regular basis.... March 23, 2008 6:01 PM | TrackBack