Light - it's a funny thing.  A beautiful thing.  A predictable thing... but a very tough thing to bend completely to your will when it's only there for a fraction of a second at a time :)

The most recent set up on the site was taken a couple of weeks ago with some friends from deviantArt, Pete and Fiona.  The two girls were in black latex catsuits and I decided to shoot them against a blue backdrop to create a nice colour contrast. 

The backdrop is a Lastolite Hilite - basically a huge (2m by 2m) softbox.  A softbox is usually a nylon or similar box with a front panel made from translucent white material that creates a large light source when lit from behind - or in this case, within.  This time I had two flash heads firing into it, one from either side - each covered with a blue gel (heat resistant, coloured, transparent plastic) to create the blue colour. There's also white vinyl train on the floor, though the join isn't quite as neat as it looks in the photos (a right pain to do in Photoshop - or rather, Capture NX2 and PaintShop Pro, my tools of choice). 

The first thing you have to figure out is that if you want to make a colour more intense, you don't turn the light up, which is often the intuitive response.  You actually have to turn the relative level of the coloured light down in order to get it to be more saturated.  Otherwise it just goes towards white.

The next tricky thing is getting the other flash heads to light the girls without shining onto the backdrop.  (For the technically minded, I was using a smaller softbox and a beauty dish, as well as a snooted hairlight... if that sounds like Martian to you then basically lighting the latex, the faces and the back of the hair to separate it from the background).  Having other lights shining on the background would have desaturated the blue colour.

I didn't have quite the right equipment to do this neatly, so I had to hang, clamp and tape all sorts of black bits of material and card to stop the strobes hitting the backdrop, while still effectively lighting the girls.  That was a bit of a pain, so I've now added a few more parts to my kit - barn doors and a gridded reflector, to be precise!  (Again, sorry for the Martian).

Anyway, the end results looked pretty good I think.  I'd almost want to add a bit more variety to the backdrop now - I like the shadows on the floor, but the "internally lit" backdrop is actually designed to avoid shadows!  I may go back and try adding some in at some point, to see how that looks. 

You'd think this kind of photography was all about pretty girls and enjoying the moment.  And you'd be right... but the amount of technical stuff required to take a good photo is pretty surprising sometimes!  Then again, maybe the champagne we were drinking didn't help very much...  ;)

In any case - I hope you like the images!

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