Classmate Portrait

My first shoot in the studio fell just short of a total train wreck. When we were walking through studio setups in lab, I felt that I had everything down cold, however once I got in there and was actually making the decisions and in charge of laying out the entire setup, the whole process seemed a little more daunting. Despite this, I felt like I learned a lot and that I will be about a billion times better prepared next time I'm in there.

OK for my first shot, I used an extremely straightforward setup. On light with a snoot, up high and aimed down at Debrin's shoulder. I powered it at 1200 but then backed it down to 600. Debrin brought a black cloth to wrap around her back, and I think that that pretty much made the photograph by finishing the strong lines and shapes.

For the second shot, things were neither straightforward nor particularily successful. At the time we didn't have a white background and had three heads, so because I wanted two lights on Debrin, I had only one light to try and turn the background white. Obviously it didn't work very well, with the left side blowing out but then fading to the right. This light was at 1200 with the two front lights at half that, 600 each. I think the biggest problem was that with the two front lights being equal and combining to equal the power on the background, the pictured ended flattening out pretty badly. Neither the soft box from above nor the snoot from the bottom were necessarily the key light, which takes away from the photo's emotion.