Assignment, Photography

Improvising when you don’t have a light stand for your portraits

I’m usually downtown walking around with my cameras during the 1st Thursday of every month when the downtown galleries host the monthly Art Walk.

I love seeing the energy the younger folks bring each month.

I don’t always step in to see the artwork.

I’m there to people watch.

And it’s a good opportunity for me to find interesting faces.

Ones I can later approach to do portraits.

On this most recent Art Walk, I ran into Caitlin who modeled for my students when I taught my Small Flash lighting class.

She was waiting backstage amongst about a hundred other runway models for her turn on the catwalk during the fashion show  in the downtown mall.

It was close to  6 pm.

Exposure at that time was ISO 100 around 1/250 sec between f4 and f2.8.

The light was perfect: directional and it had a warm glow.

Mouse over the picture above to see my super fancy technique of light placement.

Posing Caitlin against the dark background made her stand out but it also meant I needed to boost the shadow areas specifically her face. My main light, a 600EX-RT Speedlite was gelled and placed inside a Lumiquest soft box and set to stand inside my Domke camera bag.
Posing Caitlin against the dark background made her stand out but it also meant I needed to boost the shadow areas specifically her face. My main light, a 600EX-RT Speedlite was gelled and placed inside a Lumiquest soft box and set to stand inside my Domke camera bag.

By the way, I was kicking myself for leaving my light stand in the car when I saw Caitlin.

I had not plan on seeing anyone I knew, so that meant I had to improvise.

There was no time to head to the car to get the light  stand, I was burning daylight as they say.

In trying to get as much variety in my shots, I backed up and shot a few verticals. Exposure ISO 50, 1/125 sec @f4. My Speedlite was the main light again.
In trying to get as much variety in my shots, I backed up and shot a few verticals. Exposure ISO 50, 1/125 sec @f4. My Speedlite was the main light again.r.

In my camera bag was 1 body, usual complement of lenses and 2 600-EX-RT Speedlites, gel kit and transmitter ST-E3-RT.

The very directional light was wonderful but it meant the contrast would be a problem if Caitlin stood upright because there was no easy way to fill on the side away from the sun.

The setting sun is on the right in the vertical picture below.

(Mouse over the picture to see the placement of my voice actuated light stand. lol 😉 )

For those pictures where Caitlin wasn’t standing upright, all I could do was stick my Speedlite inside my camera bag and set the bag on anything stable to get it off the ground.

That meant my light placement was limited to no higher than 3 feet off the ground.

Mouse over the picture above to see where my Speedlite was placed. Before you do that, take a guess.

The immediate area where I photographed Caitlin.
The immediate area where I photographed Caitlin.

Click on the picture on the left to get an idea of where I was working.

All pictures taken with Canon 5DMark 2, Canon 600-EX-RT fitted with 1/4 Color Temperature Orange gel inside a Lumiquest softbox.