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Lavender Mint Apricot - Lighting Adventures!

This is the first of my Lighting Adventures!

I’d been meaning to shoot with Emi for ages after I met her at Animania last year, eventually we got arount to shooting last weekend. I knew she had purple hair and I was really keen to try out some fun pastel coloured stuff with pretty patterned fabrics.

I brought along a kimono I had around with a pretty purple obi and found a nice orange shawl at Eastern Flaire and when I met her, I took her to Cream on King where they have lots of pretty clothes with lots of 60/70s prints and found a nice green top that looked like it’d fit and then we headed off to the studio.

With most of my strobe work since I upgraded from the Nikon D50 to the D300s until now I’d generally been shooting at quite tight apertures to get the ambient lighting down and bumped up the power on the flash to get nice moody lighting. Today I was going to try something different! I popped on my ND4 and Polarising filter to cut down a large amount of the light coming through the lens and stopped up to f/2.8 to get a much softer feel compared to my earlier work.

I was a bit annoyed by the amount of light spillage on the back wall so I grabbed some black boards I had laying around that I had planned to turn into a softbox grid but had never finished and threw together some makeshift barndoors to control the light a little.

Played around with positioning patterned fabrics but didn’t quite get the effect I was after, I think I need more fabric!

Being able to quickly toggle on and off the various lights with the Phottix Strato II was rather nifty to try out some dramatic lighting stuff although they seem to chew through AAAs.

We ate a delicious lunch at Japan Village and then returned to the studio, but went out to the back yard with an SB800 in a Softlighter II 60” up real high on a stand and a blue gelled YN560 to add some mood.

I felt the classy shoes didn’t fit nicely with the grungy warehouse, however there was a lot of broken glass so we used wooden blocks to lay out some stepping stones

Until next time! When hopefully I’ll have some softbox grids constructed to get some more directional light!

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• strobist
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