Building on Inspiration

Back in July, I blogged about Blair Bunting and his "wrap-around" style of lighting. His work has been an inspiration to me for quite awhile, but I haven't had the right subject to try my own watered down Strobist version of his setup.

Well, this weekend, I obtained the last pieces of my basic cycling gear and finally had a great subject for my idea. Here's the resulting photo.



Click the link for more about this photo and my setup.


What brought my attention to Blair Bunting was this post on the Strobist blog. That post also made me realize one thing; There are more lights being used in that single photo than I own in my entire kit. So how do you take three small hotshoe flashes and attempt to reproduce an awsome photo like Bunting's? Easy, you use what you have and apply a little ingenuity.

When I first visualized this shot, I wanted a semi-low key look, so I started out with just the two Vivitars at the side. This created the key component of this shot, the sculpting light on the edge, but it left my face in the dark.

To counter this I needed a third light, so I put my Canon speedlight on the camera. Knowing that I needed to fill in the shadows, I wanted the light to be fairly soft, and I wanted to warm the color just slightly for effect. So instead of using the flash straight on, I bounced the flash, set to ev-2, off a gold reflector. This provided just the right amount of fill.

The rest is just my usual photoshop processing which consists of adjusting the contrast and saturation. Look for more photos using this style of lighting as I incorporate the look into my portfolio.

-end of post-