Creating night with 2 hotshoe flashes

For our last shot of Alana, we went out into the atrium of the building where the studio was located.  This was middle of the afternoon, and a lot of natural light was coming in and bouncing around the white walls. 

Thought it would be interesting to attempt a night scene here using just hotshoe flashes.

First thing I did was set the camera's white balance to tungsten and did some test shots playing around with the exposure settings until I got the scene to a nice deep blue color:

First test shot with auto white balance:

 Switched camera white balance to "Tungsten" changes the overall color to blue:

 Increased shutter speed to darken the ambient light:

For the main light I used a Canon 550EX flash with an external battery pack, triggered with a Pocket Wizard, firing through a small softbox.  This flash was gelled with a full CTO and also a 1/4 CTO gel. The gels lit the model so that her skin and clothes would render normal on camera while everything else remained blue.

The back light was a Nikon SB-26 flash gelled with a full CTO and a 1/4 CTO gel, also triggered with a Pocket Wizard.  I added a ProKit reflector to help prevent this flash from flaring into the camera.

Didn't feel like going back to the studio to grab another lightstand, so I just used whatever was nearby to elevate this flash. Pretty ghetto, I know.

While doing test shots I kept getting reflections of the flash off of the metal columns,

 so I experimented with different positions of the main light until I settled on putting it right up next to the front column just out of the frame and skimming the light across the model's front. This had the side effect of helping to bring out the detail of Alana's red dress.

Canon 5D mkII 70-200mm f2.8L IS iso 100 1/160@f5.6

The final image came out pretty close to what I had intended.  Think it would have been nice to have a couple of zombies standing outside the glass walls behind her, but unfortunately we couldn't find any zombies that day. ;-)

Canon 5D mkII 70-200mm f2.8L IS iso 100 1/160@f5.6