Work At Home Mom and Kid (How I lit the shot)

This image is steadily gaining grounds among my stock photos. It has been sold quite a number of times already. You can see the image here.

Thought I'd share with you how I lit it.

This is a three light set up, one for the mom, the other for the kid lying on the couch and another to fill in the shadows.

The first speedlight is domed, bounced off a white paper taped onto the screen of the laptop. The next speedlight is as camera left, zoomed to 200mm and aimed at the kid. The third speedlight is behind the camera and bounced off the ceiling. This third speedlight fill in the deep shadows produced by the hard lights.

Camera settings were ISO 200, f5.6, 1/200th.

Hope this helps. Happy shooting!

Signing A Contract

So what does a struggling microstock photographer who's always on a shoestring (to almost nothing) budget do when he needs a model for a shoot?  Use himself as the model!

Well, just the hands and torso actually.

Lighting was easy but the framing took some time to perfect.  Simply because I didn't want to include my face in the shot.

The camera was obviously on a tripod.  I prefocused and triggered it via the cam's timer.

Three speedlights on this one.  One with grid, one with umbrella and the other with a dome.

Key light was on a boom stand directly above and aimed at my hands and the contract that I was signing.  It was gridded so I can contain the beam and have that spotlight effect directing your  attention at the hands and contract.  A domed speedlight was clipped under the table's edge just to bring bask some details onto my torso and act as separation light between the hands and torso.  The final speedlight with umbrella was aimed at a frosted glass behind me creating that halo shaped light at my back.

I'm proud to say that this image is available online at Shutterstock, Fotolia, Dreamstime, Depostiphotos, 123rf, Bigstock and Istock.

Hope this helps.  Happy shooting.

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.