Really Nice Light...

Tonight was one of those nights. I had an idea and I wanted to try and make a picture. A family picture of my partner Jen, me and the cat, Whitey. After playing around with the idea for an hour or so things were not working out very well, it was getting late so I pulled the plug on it. However, the time was not wasted. Instead of creating a good picture I created some really nice light.

Below you can see one of the test shots as I was in the early stages of setting up the shot.



If you look carefully in the top right corner of the frame, you can get a wee bit of a sense of the light source. What I rigged up was two, 580EX II flashes with Sto-Fen caps shooting through a Lastolite 4x6 foot diffuser. I also created flags out of black paper, which I placed on the top side of the strobes to kill the light bouncing off the ceiling.

The set up creates a really large light source resulting in soft, wrapping light leaving only very light shadow beneath the chin. The downside is the light gets chucked everywhere. It is quite similar to what you would get shooting through a large umbrella but the main intention tonight was to try something different, to find a different way to create some really nice light.

The shot didn't succeed (for now) but the light did.

Keep shooting.