Today's post comes from the book Nikon Speedlight Handbook by Stephanie Zettl. It is available from
Amazon.com,
Barnes & Noble, and other fine retailers.
THE ART DECO COUCH
LOCATION: The lounge of an art deco hotel
EQUIPMENT: three sb-900 speedlights, mono-pod, RadioPoppers, Nikon D700 camera
CAMERA SETTING: f/2.8, 1/100 second , 1000 ISO
FLASH SETTINGS: TTL , FEC –1 EV for main light, FEC –1.3 EV for accent light. Each speedlightwas equipped with a RadioPopper. The main light and accent light were controlled by an on-camera master flash set to commander.
My camera’s white balance was still set to tung-sten from a previous shoot when I took the first photograph from this session, but I found the unnatural color palette appealing and decided to continue using it ( images 1 and 2) .
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| #1 |
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| #2 |
I liked the spotlight effect of the direct flash on Mallory, but I didn’t like how there was no definition to her legs. To address this, I placed a second accent Speedlight on the floor to camera right and aimed it toward her legs. While it prop-erly illuminated her legs, it also caused a distract-ing cross shadow on the couch (images 3 and 4). By using a piece of black foam to flag my flash I was able to better control the light falling on her legs (images 5 and 6) .
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| #3 |
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| #4 |
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| #5 |
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| #6 |
For comparison, I also photographed our beautiful model in the same setup with a soft-box and a more accurate color balance. You can see how these changes created a totally different mood in the shot (images 7 and 8) .
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| #7 |
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| #8 |
