Skip to main content

It's Not The Light, Its What You Do With It.


Standard soft-light shot with umbrella

Snoot light for that film-noir look

This past weekend I had the opportunity to shoot with a very talented East Coast makeup artist, and an amazing model (!)
          Since I knew that I would be working in a relatively small space, and did not want to set up lots of plugged in lights, I used a Vivitar 285-HV speed light and bounce umbrella. Once we got the images we were after, but before we wrapped the shot and struck the set, I dropped a snoot on the light, swiveled it around, and tried my version of a "noir / vintage album cover" look. These are just quick samples of both styles, pretty much as they look straight from the camera. The refined, polished, edited versions will be coming up later - but it is nice to see that even a small and often overlooked "old-school" flash unit can still create pretty impressive light!

Comments

Post a Comment

All comments will be moderated. Comments containing profanity, abusive speech, or questionable content will not be published.

Popular posts from this blog

Playing With Dramatic Light

I have this image that keeps recurring in my mind. It involves the cold blue feeling of a dark winter and the glowing orange of a firelight. So far it seems to keep eluding me, although I think this is largely because every attempt I have made to capture this "mood" has been done in a hurry, or in the rain, or some other situation that forced me to run through it rather than walk it out. This shot is one such version. I may need to go back with a slightly different lighting setup and try some more. Perhaps in a different location.
2 comments
Read more

Everything Old is New Again...

Due to events that would take far too long to explain here, I now find myself working with a camera that I have not used for more than half a decade. Granted, it will largely be used only as a back-up at this point, but the question of why  anyone would 'go back' to using such "antiquated" technology as a 10-year old (at the time of this writing) digital camera that is only 12.3 megapixels and has a max ISO of 3200 has an interesting series of answers. Let me cite the method to my madness. The camera in question is a Nikon D-90 with a vertical grip. At the time it was released it was considered a top-shelf pro-sumer model, and it was the definitive purchase that pushed me from film into digital. At 12.3MP, it was quite the heavy hitter for it's time, considering it was not all that many iterations down the line from the days of the "5MP cieling", where even high end DSLRs were still climbing out of the 3.2 range. To show you just how far things have co
Post a Comment
Read more
Hello, and welcome to the C.M. Franke Photography Blog! Stop by as often as you like to see new posts and rambling thoughts about light, color, and all of the other cool stuff that makes photography the dream we all chase and live!
Post a Comment
Read more