Lighting a Glass Chess Set

This is one of my favorite images.  I like how the lights interacted with the subject matter and with each other.

This is a glass chess set which I found lying around the house. I've always wanted to shoot a chess set to illustrate the concepts of planning, game and strategy. I think the image concept can be applied to a lot of image requirements such as business and sports.

Lighting was fairly simple, here's how I did it.

There were three speedlights for this shot. Two of them gelled red and blue accordingly. All of the speedlights had grids on them so I was able to contain the beams on selected areas .  The red gelled speedlight was at camera right and aimed at the pawn and knight. The blue gelled speedlight was at camera left and aimed at the rook and bishop. The final non-gelled speedlight was at camera left and aimed at the King which I tilted with my finger just to animate the shot a bit. This was shot with the camera on a tripod and I used a 70-300mm lens to produce bokeh. Camera settings were iso200, 1/200 and f6.3. The speedlights were at a low power output since they were pretty close to the subject. Can't remember the exact numbers because I just chimped it.

You can find the image live online at Shutterstock, Fotolia, Dreamstime, Bigstock, 123rf, Depositphotos and Istock.

Hope this helps. Happy shooting.