Fake Sun

Though not a big fan of the show, I felt some sense of pride when I was assigned to shoot Biggest Loser Asia finalist Chef Carlo Miguel. I didn't realize what the fuzz was about until I saw his before photos, and men!...it was really quiet a feat he achieved there!

My client ran a story on weight loss and Chef Carlo was on top of the list as a subject.

We did several layouts for the shoot and almost all of them showed how much weight he lost. I wanted to do something not-so-stating-the-obvious so I decided to have one layout with him just sitting down (this shot is an outtake and didn't make print....it lacked that weight-loss-feel thingy).

I was looking for mood and texture for this one shot with him and saw this part of the restaurant. I loved the textured light at the end of the room and decided that that will be my backdrop. I also liked the sunlight coming in from the door at camera left and planned to use this as my main light. Mood and texture?... check and check.

I framed the shot, metered for the ambient light and did a test shot. For my desired exposure, I needed to set my cam at ISO400, my shutter speed at 1/60 and aperture at f3.5.

Good to go? I thought so, until I did a test shot with a stand-in. The sun wasn't lighting my subject well enough. I didn't want to change any of my cam setting anymore since I already liked what I saw. I didn't want to flood the shot with artificial light either since this was not the mood I was gunning for.

Solution? I placed a single strobe at camera left, beside the door where sunlight was coming in, mimicking the sunlight. Set it at the lowest power setting and bounced it off an umbrella. The result put the shot where I want it to be but still felt that my "fake sun" still looked fake. It was still too harsh and I was already at the lowest power setting of my strobe. Again, I didn't want to change any of my cam setting so I need to do something about my "fake sun". So I placed a white transluscent cloth on my umbrella, ala Softlighter, to achieve the desired lighting.

The result was this shot. Doesn't look fake eh?

Hope this helps. Happy shooting!