Studio Shoot: Jodie’s Antlers
- Sunday, 13th January 2008The motivation for this shoot was to get a shot of our one year old yellow Lab, Jodie, wearing festive antlers (as you do)! I decided to keep the set-up relatively simple, especially as a dog has a tendency to move around a lot. I used the 80x60cm softbox as the main light camera-right at around 45 degrees. I positioned it around 3 feet from the ground pointing down towards the subject. A ‘sunfire’ reflector camera-left filled the shadows with a warm light. Below is a diagram (created using an excellent lighting set-up Photoshop file by Kevin Kertz) showing the set-up:
I selected the white paper background (from my wide selection of two backgrounds), which I attempted to light with the second light. I don’t yet own a short lighting stand or a background reflector so I had to make do with the wide angle reflector and the light positioned to the left and pointing towards the background. As you’ll see in some of the photographs, it didn’t exactly provide even lighting coverage of the background (which meant more time spent Photoshopping), which I think could have been better achieved with either a short stand (hide the light behind the subject) or perhaps a boom to raise the light above the background – both ensuring the light is centred to the background.
Here are the photos taken with my Canon 350D and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L @ f/11 (first one at f/10), 1/200, ISO 100:
Poor Jodie was suffering from a "cold water tail" at the time, so she had a few moments of chasing her tail manically.
The goal of the shoot:
Then Lynsey had a go with the camera and I tried to pose Jodie. Between us we managed to get some great shots, below.
