I am crazy about the Strobist blog http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/. David Hobby exclusively uses off camera flash to create moody and diverse lighting set ups without lugging around heavy studio flashes. There is a great tutorial that helps you create the lighting of this portrait at sundown of a man on his boat.
Here is how he does it..
Every now and then at The Sun, someone from features will come up to a photog and say, "We're looking for something... conceptual."Translation: We have thought and thought about this story, and we cannot come up with a single idea we can box you into.What I hear: Try anything you want. We're washing our hands of it.Which, of course, I like. On the one hand, you are getting very little direction, which can be iffy. But on the other hand, whatever you do they can't really complain. As long as it is conceptual.The story is on recently divorced (or separated) guys who have chosen to live on their boats in Baltimore. So I call three of them and schedule to shoot a portrait of each one.A heads-up from the writer tells me which one will be in the story's lede, so he's the guy that will need to carry the visual weight.I am gonna take you through the thought process a little on this one. As I said earlier in the "Taming Harsh Sunlight" entry, I like to stack the deck in my favor whenever I can. So I schedule my lede guy to be shot 30 minutes before sunset. If the light is good, I can use the golden light on him. If it is bad, I can use my small strobes easily because the ambient light level will be low.(Either way, I can strobe him after sunset for a different look.)Taking a little poetic license on this (hey, they wanted conceptual) I am going to do it in dark, cool tones. These guys have all been through (or are going through) the period of depression that normally follows the breakup of a marriage, so it fits.The photo at top is done with one Nikon SB-28 strobe, on a stand, with a cardboard snoot to control the beam of the light. The cool blue color is generated by setting the camera's white balance on tungsten, and putting a CTO gel on my flash to balance the light that hits the guy.Click on the photo up top to see it much bigger, and you will see how crisp the light is when you (a) hard-light from the side, and, (b) have built-in color contrast between your strobe and your ambient.
EDIT: Looking at the big version, it is very splotchy on the continuous tones. This is because I jpegged the heck out of it to save blog storage space on a big version. They do set a limit, and I try to keep the pix as thrifty as possible to allow more stuff to be posted. Sorry 'bout that, and I hope you get the idea anyway. For more moody portraits lighting ideas check out ...http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/04/on-assignment-guy-on-boat.html
EDIT: Looking at the big version, it is very splotchy on the continuous tones. This is because I jpegged the heck out of it to save blog storage space on a big version. They do set a limit, and I try to keep the pix as thrifty as possible to allow more stuff to be posted. Sorry 'bout that, and I hope you get the idea anyway. For more moody portraits lighting ideas check out ...http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/04/on-assignment-guy-on-boat.html
