Here is my entry for the third strobist bootcamp assignment. You can read about my entry for the 1st assignment here, and for the 2nd assignment here. I was quite pleased with the results. The shot’s story from my flicker post to the strobist group can be found at the bottom:

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I managed to again wait until a few days before the deadline to shoot my entry for assignment number three. Luckily Aaron was a good sport and kindly offered up his time. I struggled a lot with how to make someone look smart while sticking with the theme. I knew that any old shot of Aaron wouldn’t cut it, so I went through some ideas of what to include. The day was quite overcast so directly using the sun was out. I thought about shooting Aaron indoors and using some creative lighting to make it seem as though Aaron was glowing, but thought that idea was too close to what I did for assignment number 1, and the whole point of this bootcamp is to try new things. I then thought about a “work” setting, like up at the blackboard or working on the computer, but decided that was too plain and didn’t really have anything to do with the solar panel theme.

We thus ultimately headed outside where I noticed this cool building that looked like it was covered with solar panels. I figured that it would fit the overall theme for this assignment, and would certainly have been appropriate had Aaron been the designer of the solar panels that were covering the building.

I decided to shoot Aaron from on the ground to make it feel as though we were looking up at him. This seemed to give him a smarter “feel.” I then setup a light stand with a Canon 580EX being fired into an umbrella about three feet directly in front of Aaron (AKA camera left at 90 degrees). I added a Canon 580EX directly behind Aaron firing back towards him. I wanted to have a slight halo around his head to help separate him from the building and make him seem as though he were glowing. I ultimately turned that flash off, however, as I didn’t like the effect it had. You can see the whole setup here:

I metered for ambient and then dialed down the shutter speed a bit to slightly underexpose the background. I then manually set the flash to an arbitrary setting and took a few shots that contained only Aaron’s face in the frame. Once his face was over exposed, I turned the flash down slightly and was set. I took a few different shots with his head in various positions, but ultimately liked the one with his head half over the building. The shot below was not bad, but I thought that the space between his head and the building made the building seem a bit distant and unrelated. Let me know what you think and if the shot below is better:

My final exposure settings were 40mm f/8 1/160s at ISO 640.

Technical Details:
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Digital
Lens: Canon 24-105 F/4.0 L IS USM
Memory Card: Ritek Pro-2 8GB
Wireless Transmitter: Canon ST-E2
Flash(x2): Canon Speedlite 580EX in slave mode
All images shot in RAW
Used Adobe Camera RAW to convert to JPG

Here are a few other backup shots I took at a gazebo in the same area. A few came out nice but there was no connection to the solar panel theme:

These two shots were a lot more complicated, and required that I use 3 strobes including one to light the background. Ultimately I decided to submit the single strobe in an umbrella shot. Simple is quite often better

-Andy
http://www.andrewstrauss.net