Saturday, February 20, 2010

Beauty Dish: Dahlia

I'm trying to familiarize myself with using big strobes. Yesterday I managed to get my hands on a set of Profoto D1 monolights and some fun light modifiers.


I used three lights. One in a beauty dish (key), boomed above the model. One in a strip box camera right (fill), and one with a simple reflector, nuking the background.

Setup was about 25 minutes, and I'm sure I could bring that down further as I get used to the lights.
Lacking a PocketWizard or other radio trigger, I had to use a PC sync cable. I am not a fan of PC cables. There were a lot of black frames while I learned the specific position the cable had to be in. Annoying.

I shot tethered to my macbook pro with my new 10 foot USB extension cable. I angled the computer so that my model could see her poses and how the light hit her. This was great because she got instant feedback, but not so great because she kept moving off her mark to see the computer.
My only gripe with shooting tethered is that I can't turn off the camera... because when I turn it back on it re-imports all the photos I've already taken. I'm used to turning off the camera whenever I'm not shooting, so it took a few re-imports for me to get used to leaving the silly thing on.

Results:





Not a whole lot of post going on here. Sharpening, vignette, contrast. I tried to do some minor skin cleanup in Aperture, but that program is such a PIG that I gave up and moved into photoshop for blemish removal.


Dahlia is a fantastic model and her eyes are absolutely gorgeous. I'll post some color images in the future after I've had some time to edit those.

Feedback is appreciated, as always!