Someone recently mentioned the desire for people to post details of how they lit their entires. Since the B/W sitll life challenge involved some work with lighting for most of us, I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a thread with details.
Here's mine:
Presently, my lighting gear is composed mostly of some bargain bin flashes, with inexpensive umbrellas and reflectors.
I wanted the primary lighting to be coming from the right, but still needed a bit of fill on the left, otherwise the shadows would be too deep and not show any detail at all. Initially, I tried it with just the strobes on the right and reflector on the left, but had to add another strobe for some more fill. Here's what I ended up with:
-2 Vivitar 2800's to the right, behind a shoot-through umbrella.
-Handheld Vivitar 2800, with a small softbox on it, pointing at a 32" reflector on the left.
-Optical peanut triggers on all the 2800's.
-Canon 430ex on the hotshoe, snooted, pointed to the right, and set to the lowest power. Just enough to trigger the optical slaves, but not enough to affect the image.
-Manual mode exposure, since optical slaves are not exactly TTL-aware devices. It usually takes me a handful of test shots to get the exposure correct. |