Diego Correal Imagery: sport photography

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Edge light and milking your set ups

Like I mention before, I've been working at Ultra the Night Club for more then a year now. A few months ago I had chance to photograph one of the bouncers that I work with, X. X isn't only a bouncer but he is also a personal trainer; so naturally he is very muscular and I knew that I wanted to capture that in the images. The way I did that was by using a edge lighting set up.

I put two White Lightning X800 lights with foldable medium softboxes behind him pointing them toward his shoulders. I also add two White Lightning X1600 lights: one with a 5 degree Profoto honeycomb grid taped on that was pointed to the back of his head and the other with a silver beauty dish to light his face. The last light I used was a Canon 580ex II speedlite with a LumiQuest Softbox III and a full CTO gel on it aimed from the bottom to give a warm fill from the bottom. The last idea I used was two V-flats on each side of him as gobos so I would get anything flare form the rim lights. I have add a lighting diagram that I made at Online Lighting Diagram and more images from the shoot below.

After about and hour of shooting, X and I got the shoots we need and he left. Then I said to my self why am I going to strike the set that took me about an hour and a half to two hours to set up alone and not keep using it. So I called Victor, a friend that plays soccer for FC Greater Boston Bolts, to get some more use out of the set up. I kept all the same lighting but I did change the gel in the speedlite from a full CTO to a full CTB to get a cool light from the fill to play off the colors of the Bolts' logo.