I really enjoyed making these photos, Sarah and Andrew - two models who are crazy enough to work with me - are an absolute blast to be around.
We took over the laundry room in one of the dorms on campus. To do that with a minimal amount of traffic, we chose to do the shoot at 2am (and yes, people do still do laundry at 2am).
Here are a couple of the end-products!
Sarah
Andrew
Sarah and Andrew
Shown in order of increasing light complexity.
The most important light in this shoot was my pizza-box softbox.
It attaches to my SB600 (or any speedlight) with velcro. Made out of a pizza box from Papa Johns, covered inside and out with copy paper. Really simple. Amazingly inexpensive. To keep the light moderately even, I put a piece of aluminum foil in the center. The flash fires directly into this foil, which then bounces the light around to the rest of the softbox. The catchlight (specular highlight reflected in a person's eye) that this creates is much more interesting than just a solid white one.
The first shot above of just Sarah was taking only with this pizza-light. It was used as the key light in the rest of the photos, with various other speedlights as rimlight and background light. Check out the series on Flickr to see a few more photos and some more in-depth light explanation. (Please note that some of these photos are not quite work-appropriate)
Most of the photographers I know trigger off-camera lights with Pocketwizards. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to trigger all the lights for this shoot with just the pop-up on my D300 in "Commander Mode." I used an SB600, SB800 and SB900 and they all triggered flawlessly.
Have a great Wednesday!
