Mizomi Photography: Alyssa and Alana

Friday, May 13, 2011

Alyssa and Alana - Old bridge shoot

Kahulani, Ronald and I met up with models Alyssa and Alana for another shoot, this time in the late afternoon at the old train bridge in Wailuku.

Since we had three photographers this time, we planned to do two different lighting setups in separate areas so that we could all be shooting at the same time. Due to time constraints and the high winds we experienced that day, we ended up doing just one lighting setup and rotating the photographers and models through that.

While we were setting up our lighting at the location, Alyssa was already coming up with ideas I never even thought of doing at this location. Since our lighting was setup in the other arch from where she started doing these poses, we ended up shooting this with just natural light. The sun had just gone below the mountains behind our location, but there was still enough light from the sky coming down so give her a soft rim light. Shot it with the 85mm for a shallow DOF to pull the attention to Alyssa and also to blur out the fencing way in the background.

Canon 5D mkII 85mm f1.2L iso400 1/640@f2.0

It was really windy at this location in the early evening and it stirred up a lot of dust. It seemed to calm down a bit when we first got there so I thought "maaaaaaybe I could get away with putting up the Octodome if I braced the edge of it against one of the walls".

Big Mistake.

As soon as I set it up, the wind picked up again and started whipping the Octodome around in every direction EXCEPT the one we wanted.

So then I tried switching to a medium softbox. Of course the wind just laughed at me and said "Dude, don't even THINK about it".

Soooo we finally went to the beauty dish which seemed to hold up pretty well.

Yeah I know, I know. I shoulda just started with the darn dish in the first place.
I'm dense like that sometimes.

So here is the lighting setup. If you look at the photo at the very beginning of this post, you'll see that each wall has two archways. About the third wall in, one of the openings is sealed up. We set up in this archway, with the sealed wall behind as a backdrop.

Our main light was an Alien Bee 800 and beauty dish setup in front of the archways off to the right about 45 degrees. Behind the archway wall are 4 more lights - another AB800 and 3 Nikon SB26s. One of the SB26 flashes was used to light the back wall and the rest of the lights were setup to rim light the models and also to light the ground behind them.

This is the view from behind showing one of the rim lights- the AB800. If you look past the wall off to the left, you can see about where we placed the main beauty dish light.

Here Ronald is setting up one of the SB26 flashes on a lightstand as a rim light. There is one more SB26 on the ground that has a CTO gel on it to add some warmth light to the ground behind the models.

Another angle (shot from the archway where the models were standing) showing the AB800 rim light and also the third SB26 which is aimed at the wall. This third SB26 was gelled to add color to the background.

All these lights were mostly triggered with Pocket Wizards. The SB26 on the ground didn't have one attached (ran out of Pocket Wizards) so it was set to trigger optically instead.

It was starting to get dark by this time, so we had to hurry. For the first look, we used a dark blue gel to light the wall behind the arch. If you look closely at the background light, you'll see a diagonal shaft of light below the blue - that was a happy accident - because the blue gel didn't quite cover the flash head completely.

Canon 5D mkII 85mm f1.2L iso200 1/160@f7.1

I'd be lying if I said we meant to do that. Sometimes things happen and it's best to just roll with it. Especially when you're rushing to get the shots done before the wind covers your models in dirt.

Canon 5D mkII 85mm f1.2L iso200 1/160@f7.1

For the second look, we swapped out the blue gel with a red gel for the background. This time we were able to fully cover the flash head with the red gel for a more solid background color.