Boys With Toys
Sunday, November 8th, 2009, 12:08
I haven’t had the opportunity to shoot much recently due to a pretty hectic workload, having to travel quite a bit and also having the weather scupper my plans for some location shoots 
But yesterday, a member of my camera club invited me along to help out on a shoot with a Ferrari and a model, in an underground car park… how could I say no?
It was a pretty unique shoot in terms of having access to that location and that car and of course Katrina. So for a few hours we went all out with lights and triggers and it really was a case of boys with toys 
I’ve included the diagram for the lighting setup for the main image above. In total it was a 6 light setup, mixing studio strobes (Bowen & Elinchrome) with flashes (Nikon SB900′s). The car was lit on the left by two 4 foot softboxes and on the front by a third smaller softbox. The background was lit using the SB900′s with blue gels attached. Finally we lit Katrina with a shoot through umbrella. The lights were triggered by a combination of pocket wizards and just slaving the lights.
We tried to mix it up quite a bit in terms of different lighting setups (it also gave us the excuse to have to move the car around 
). Most of the setups used softboxes for lighting the car and model, but for an edgier look, apart from asking Kat to put on some thigh high boots, we went with grids as the primary light source.
The grid to models left was the main light source for both model and car. We had a second grid to camera right for fill on the model and a small softbox on very low power as a fill for the side of the car. The SB900′s with the blue gels were hidden behind the car, again providing background light and some additional colour.
We probably shot about 10 different sets, really just tweaking and playing with the position of the lights and car, mixing it up between hard and soft light, playing with lighting the background as well as trying to darken everything down but the model and car. All just a bit of fun really. It was just good to be back with a camera in my hand and being given the opportunity to try and be creative with lights.
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Tags: camera club, car, car park, colour, dublin, ferrari, flash, katrina, model, strobist
November 8th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
nice pics but the girl kept gettin in the way of car hee hee
November 8th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Nice Shots – clothes on for a change lol
November 13th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Some very nice shots again. Thanks for showing the light setup as well.
How do you decide the strenght of the lights, do you experiment with several settings or do you calculate the light. How do you in the end do the correct mesuring for the subjects?
November 17th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Its actually a pretty simple process. First and foremost you have to expose for the brightest light (which ever one that ends up being). If you don’t, what ever that is lighting will be blown/over exposed. You can have lights darker than that one, or at the same power.. but never brighter.
So with this in mind, you just need to decide where you want the brightest light. In this case I decided I wanted the main light to be the one(s) on the car. I positioned the two lights and softboxes so they were lighting the car and metered from the car back towards the light. From recollection this was giving me about f9/f10
After that its down to ratios. If you want the background as bright, you dial up the power of those strobes so that they’re also reading f9/f10 or if you want them darker, dial them down a stop or two to f5.6/f6 The same process applies to the model.
For most of these, the lighting was balanced (i.e. same light on the model, car and background). Hope that explains things?