Fashion graduate
Still shooting students, which is fine with me.
Cristina graduated from a fashion course last year and she’s in this shot with some of her designs.
The room is actually full of sewing machines, you can just make out one on the desk behind her, but I cropped pretty tightly on this one, so you do lose that. The other feature of the room though, is the floral pattern behind her, which breaks up the mostly red brick decor.
As for lighting, I had stopped down far enough to remove most of the ambient but there were fluros everywhere, and in some of the long, portrait shots I was getting some of them in frame, which was unsightly, so the lights had to go off. The only problem was that the lights were controlled by motion sensor, so when we turned them off, as soon as anyone moved, they’d come on again. So we had an assistant doing full-time duty at the light switch.
I originally had the key light, a shoot-through brolly, to camera left with a second flash (diffused and snooted) at far camera right as a kicker to pick up the dress on the right and fill in some shadow on that side of her face. I had the key flash (580EXII) at about 1/8. The other flash is an old thyristor (I picked it up for $20 when I got my Holga) that doesn’t really have a manual setting, hence it was diffused with some translucent white material. I then control the amount of light by moving it closer, or further away, depending on what I want. Often though, it means that I’m balancing the key to come up to this one, as I can’t realistically get it below what would probably be 1/4 power on a “proper” flash.
But then, with the lights off, I noticed that there was a really subtle, yet quite attractive rim light occuring naturally from the window, which is exposed to outdoors but through tinted glass, so I rearranged things so the key was to camera right, I opened up to f2.8 at 400ISO and set the flash to 1/32. I then had the second flash behind a screen (so it didn’t hit the subject directly) but pointing straight up to the white ceiling, for a bit of bounced fill.
