Dramatic lighting set up

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted…I’ve been crazy busy lately. So, with that excuse out of the way, here’s a set up for a dramatic lighting shot.

I had an idea to shoot a picture that had a neo-ninja feel to it. I wanted it to be anachronistic in that the subject is in a dark suit and tie like a modern professional “solver of problems” you would see in the movies, but he’s carrying a samurai sword, which, in itself, speaks of his overwhelming confidence in his abilities. No guns needed with this guy. For the shot I enlisted a friend who runs a local Taekwon-do school…and, while he’s obviously not a professional “solver of problems” in the sense I meant it, I certainly wouldn’t want to get on his bad side — I’ve seen him do things that I didn’t think were physiologically possible, you see….very impressive/scary.

First of all, I’d like to point out that lighting is my achilles heel, so to speak. In my early learning of photography I inexplicably ignored learning about flash since I primarily shot wildlife and nature shots where natural light was pretty much all I needed. Well, now I’m playing catch up. The funny thing is that now that I’ve made an effort to educate myself on studio and small flash setups, I’m becoming completely fascinated with it. I truly admire the masters of lighting, cause it’s not easy to do right…at least I don’t find it so.

Anyway, I fiddled around one morning trying to figure out how I wanted to light the following picture to match the vision I had in my head. I used my wife as a model wearing one of my suit jackets, sunglasses, and a broom handle for a sword…I’d love to post those pictures, but my wife, knowing me all too well, explained (as one would to a small child) that while a broom handle isn’t a samurai sword it’ll still leave a mark, which I’d find out first hand if I didn’t delete those pictures immediately. Apparently she doesn’t feel my instincts for self-preservation are fully developed. She sometimes demonstrates feats of great wisdom, my wife. I say sometimes only because she actually married me, which shows she isn’t consistently wise.

I’ve included a diagram, since I believe the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”…especially if those words are a poorly written, disjointed explaination of what I was trying to do, as is often the case with me.

So the main light, the Vivitar, is about four feet to the right side of the subject, eye level, and slightly behind his shoulder (about 110 degrees to the plane of the camera). It is set to 1/4 power. This lit the side of his face, arm (although the black coat absorbed most of the light), his hand and the sword.

The kicker light, the SB-800, was fitted with a homemade 6″ snoot made of poster board and wrapped twice in black hockey tape (to make sure it was fairly light tight on the sides), set to f/11 at 1/8 power, and was zoomed out to it’s max setting of 105mm. It was also on a stand set at about 5 or 6 feet high so that it could be tilted downward at a rough 45 degree angle. This light was aimed at the sword so that it would add highlights along it’s length.

Note: Some post production work in Photoshop was done to the final image. For example, the raw shot out of the camera showed a slight hint of the other side of the sunglasses which I didn’t want. I wanted him to look like he was about to disappear into the shadow. So, I did some light Burning to that part of the photo just to clean it up. I also sharpened it a little, and did some warming of the skin tone. Oh, and I Dodged the white in the collar a bit, too.

I have no ego, so please feel free to comment or send me some ideas on how I could have improved the shot.