New Lighting...

I had the opportunity to visit my friend, Keith Barraclough's studio the other day while he was shooting the latest installment of "Making It", a small piece that runs in the Wash Post Magazine.

Studio shoots and the tons of lighting has never been anything I ever saw myself being good at, much less enjoying. I am a documentary photographer, dammit! But I started to see the potential of it, and the enjoyment of taking what could be a mundane picture and zazzing it up. Did I just say "zazzing"? Yeah, I did.

Anyway, He lit the portrait with five lights, and since I've been educating myself on strobist.com, I felt like I had a small clue about why he did it the way he did. And the best part of the day is when he let me mess around with his nice camera and his 5 lights. I didn't move things around too much, I was just enamored with this new look. I don't shoot much with strobes. If I do, it's mostly fill, and if that. Maybe I'll have an off-camera cord and stick out to the left, and POP, I have side lighting. But beyond that, I don't shoot with strobes. And definitely not in a studio with big, powerful lights and soft boxes, and a boom to hold another above the subject. These photos are of Keith's intern, Hannah. Neither she nor I had any real idea on what to do, so she sat there, and I moved around and took a bunch of pictures, chimping along the way. So these are all the doing of Keith and his lighting, I just moved around a bunch with a camera in my hand.

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