Light the Ground!

I really like trying to find unique angles to shoot photos from.  I really try not to shoot at “5-foot-8″ as the slang goes. Sometimes, that means just taking a knee, other times, it means hanging by a rope backwards 40 feet off the ground . I had a recent portrait shoot of a new University of Lethbridge Student who is an active rock climber, and as I tend to do, I decided to light it instead of shooting (boring) available light.  With a shoot like this, where I’ve got lights all over and concrete everywhere, I really rely on my Pocket Wizard Plus II’s to ensure that I trigger my lights every time, without fail.

Two-light setup for this one. First light is the key- Large Octa.  One of the challenges I faced with this shoot is that I’m not able to move once I get set in position, and my key light is behind glass so I can’t adjust it. Simple solution there, have an assistant hang out with my key that I can call on my phone if I need to change it. This is the position of the key, just un-extended. I had it up at the top of the roofline for shooting:

Which gave us this:

Always good to check output and coverage before climbing up to a set shooting-post where I can’t get to my lights easily. Now, the key by itself isn’t enough here. If we JUST use the key, we get this (roughly):

Not Cool. We don’t want people to think she’s climbing out of a dark cave.  Solution?  Light the ground! on purpose!  To do this, I set up another light on the floor of the climbing centre.  It was an AB800 with a Large softbox, but no diffusion. We don’t need soft light when we’re just lighting the ground, and trying to make cool shadows!

As you can see, I have the softbox angled out because I don’t want it to spill onto the wall too badly- That’s what the key is for! Here’s what that gives us on the ground- We got those cool shadows from the ropes for some added bonus texture!

Now the light is a bit too hot way up by the source, but using Inverse Square Law I know that the light will tend to fall off much less quickly (for a more consistent tone) farther away from the source (and right under where I’ll be shooting) so we’re set there.

As for rigging, it’s pretty simple. I have one daisy-chain with locking carabiners on either end anchoring my camera strap to one of the gear loops on my harness:

And another daisy-chain that runs through both belay-loops out to my anchor point, which connects to itself with yet another locking carabiner.

Here are the two shooting positions that were most successful  for the shots we ended up using:  (iPhone Photos-Sorry!)



Why go to all the trouble to light this thing? Because I think that this looks terrible, and at 1600/2.8 It’s not exactly the most sharp frame ever:

BLEH. Here’s what we got doing it the “Rod Leland Way” for a final frame:

MUCH BETTER! That looks a bit more like my style doesn’t it?  Don’t settle for crappy light just because of rigging and logistics challenges! Fun shoot!

More to come!

-Rod