I’m a lazy blogger, I took these shots over Thanksgiving break while my brother was in town. I’ve been trying to do more portrait photography and to learn more about lighting. I’m trying to follow the Strobist coursework, but I definitely procrastinate more than Id like to admit. Ultimately I’m going to start taking more self portraits, but for now I needed to wait until I had another person to shoot.
This is a simple setup, basically one strobe with a shoot through umbrella that is placed on camera left with the umbrella pointing down at the subject at about 45 degrees. I placed the subject against the fireplace to add some texture to the background (and because it’s the coolest spot in our house). I was striving for a lot of shadows and contrast for this shoot, mimicking some of the pics I took during the A Camp concert.
The camera I used was my Nikon D90 with my 50mm f/1.4D lens. I also had two light stands (ended up mostly using one) with SB-26 flashes. Originally my hope was to use the Cactus radio trigger I had bought, but alas the tigger broke when I dropped it. I ended up putting the camera in Commander mode, with the hope of using the in-built optical slave of the SB-26 to set off the flash. Luckily for me this worked, even though I guess this should really not have worked at all. Also, because I was using the commander mode I effectively actually added some additional light, directly facing the subject.
I’m pretty happy with the results. I also tried processing black and white and split-tone to get a sort of Kodachrome green.
