Anna - Part 2
This is the second part of this shoot that I did with Anna a couple of weeks ago. I've been longing to use this brick pre-war bus shelter on Wicker Lane in Hale Barns for a model shoot for ages and this particular afternoon fitted the bill perfectly.
My original plan had been to place a light stand either side of the open windows and light Anna in through the open windows with a close crop showing only the edges of the structure. Alas one of the ends has been filled in, presumably to provide a little welcome shelter to any occupants, but foiling my initial plan. Plan B involved simply placing an SB900 in either corner on the floor inside the shelter at the front directed up and back towards the ceiling, but this looked bloody awful. It made Anna look like some horrendous green vampire as it cast a horrible green glow from the ceiling and the bench everywhere. Plan C took a little more effort, but worked a treat. I rigged two SB900s with Pocket Wizard MultiMaxs and bungeed them to the middle rafter on the ceiling either side of Anna.
I had to use the Pocket Wizards because with the flash units being hidden up in the rafters, I no longer had line of sight from across the road rendering Nikon's iTTL useless. The only way to trigger the strobes was using these radio triggers. Unfortunately for my legs though, these lil' fella's are certainly not the new all singing all dancing TTL units that Pocket Wizard are currently flogging around. It's all manual with these babies. Which meant lots of to-ing and fro-ing across the road to get my levels just where I wanted them. The final image was shot at 1/125 sec F2.8 at ISO200 - it was a bright day, but I found that at this point I could avoid blowing out the background around the shelter and still have enough control over the ambient inside to avoid showing the back wall too much. Angling the strobes forwards slightly, so that they were aimed directly at either side of Anna and slightly towards the camera also helped here. Had I placed them on the front most rafter I would have had too much spill onto the background and I feel the direction of the light on the model would have been much less dramatic. I then applied a little dodging and burning in Silver Efex Pro 2 in post.