Kristin’s Playground

In an effort to improve my “studio” lighting, I started reading the Strobist blog. I learned some of the basics of off-camera lighting and a bunch of the terminology. Seriously - if you’re interested in off-camera lighting, take some time to read through the Lighting 101 series. Since I just found out about it, I missed going through all of his assignments and boot camp at the time, but now he’s in the process of Lighting 102, and has assignments for various techniques and concepts associated with that. The first one I tried, just after I got my umbrella, was the assignment on using one off-camera strobe (convenient - I only have one flash!) and using reflections of that flash to light up your image. He also gave us 3 different concepts to create an image based on - either financial planning, physical fitness, or going green. There were some really creative entries, and I see that I have a lot of learning to do. However, I thought I’d play along, and I tried to do a photo for the physical fitness concept. I had the image in my head, and after many, many takes (my arms/chest hurt for awhile) here’s what I came up with. The setup and explanation of it are under the cut.

This is my setup. The camera was right in front of me on the plastic container, and I had to use the self-timer to give me time to position myself. I was basically doing the push-up right over the foil-coated board. The flash fired into the umbrella to give a diffuse light over my left shoulder, and the board reflected the light up underneath me. I tried to have some of the white plastic lids on my right to fill in some on my right side, but I’m not sure that they did much.