Poo-Poo Platter

This photo makes me all sorts of happy. There’s obviously a lot of movement, but it looks calm and controlled. Margaret is smiling and not making a try-not-to-snap-neck-while-flipping-hair face (anyone who’s taken similar photos will know exactly what I’m talking about). And the lighting is nice and soft and completely not the focus of the image.

The setup for this is very simple and straightforward. I positioned Margaret about 5 ft. from the wall, so that any light I had on her wouldn’t cast any shadows. I had two Nikon SB-600s in shoot-through umbrellas positioned at about 45° off-axis at camera left and camera right. The one on the right was at 1/4 power providing most of the direct light as well as bounce light around the room. The one on the left was at 1/16 power giving me just enough light to fill the shadows a bit. Both lights were right around head-level and about 4 ft away from Margaret. The exposure is ISO 200 and 1/250th sec at f/8.

As you can see, nothing really fancy here. The emphasis of the photo is the hair movement, so I wanted to make sure that everything was broadly lit and that there were no obvious hard shadows. Shooting at my max sync speed of 1/250th sec. allowed me to freeze the hair motion, but, even then, there’s still a little bit of blurring that adds a nice soft quality to the image.

The final touch was some liberal post-processing in Lightroom to make the colors pop. I really like how the blue-green wall complements Margaret’s purple shirt and red hair. I won’t go into the details here (I’m developing yet another Develop Module Preset that I will talk about when it’s gone through some more testing and fine-tuning passes), but I will say that the back wall is actually a warm off-white color in the unedited photo. The original colors weren’t necessarily bad, but they were a bit too monotone for my tastes. I’ll save the discussion for another blog post.