Enhancing the light

Pink Lingerie, originally uploaded by Mizomi Photography.

This was shot in a bedroom that had lots of natural light coming in from all around.

I originally planned to use a Sunbounce to reflect in light from the open deck behind me for Corinne's main light. The late afternoon sun made that difficult, plus we started getting harsh sunlight across the front of the bed. So I repositioned the Sunbounce and C-stand to flag off the sunlight instead of reflecting it.

We were getting good light from all the windows, but it was a little too dark. I ended up using 3 lights to try and bring the surrounding light up just a skosh.

I used 2 Canon 580EX flashes on stands. Each was triggered with a Radiopopper trigger. On the front flash, I used a Gary Fong Whaletail Studio. The background flash had a Gary Fong Clear Lightsphere. I chose to do it this way so that the flash would reflect off of the surrounding walls and surfaces to mimic the natural light coming into the room. I also had my assistant Ronald hold a Nikon SB26 aimed at Corinne's hair to provide a rim light. This was triggered with the SB26's built in optical slave. To keep stray light from the SB26 from hitting the wall, I had Ronald use his hands to manually block the light.

In hindsight, I probably could have gotten away with just 2 lights and used the rear 580EX as the rim light instead of lighting the background. (You can barely see Ronald's head shadow on the door)

I had to shoot this pretty tight - there was a mirror on the headboard , a work area for painting (which Ronald was standing in the middle of) and a home gym setup in the space next to the bed. Just left of this bed is a whole rack of barbells. I ended up using a 70-200mm f2.8L lens on a tripod. Canon 5D iso 400 1/50@5.6