As mentioned in my previous post, it was snowing hard (historically so) and the temperatures were rather cold last Saturday, so naturally it was a perfect day for a promo shoot outside. I spent a great day shooting with Margot MacDonald, a fast-rising young musician from the DC area. I’d planned on doing a portrait with her and her band at her Friday 9:30 Club show, but that got postponed thanks to the snow, and so we decided to do an impromptu portrait session on Saturday instead. The nice thing about living in a city is that I just walked to our chosen location (in and around Dupont Circle), and Margot hopped in the metro, and getting around was no problem. Definitely not the case for my friends further out in the suburbs, who are helpless until their streets are plowed and by now are going through some serious cabin fever.

Margot brought a number of outfits and was a fantastic subject; what amazes me most is that she somehow doesn’t look cold in any of the photos, even crouching in knee-deep snow wearing a dress. She also just looks like she’s having fun in so many of the shots, which I think is in keeping with her personality and image. Because most of our shoots were in broad daylight, my favorite stuff, such as the headline photo above, tended to be shot with natural light. Snowstorms basically turn the entire world into a giant source of diffuse light - the cloudy sky becomes a huge overhead softbox, and all that already nondirectional light reflects off of the snow and fills in shadows everywhere. It’s about as flattering as natural light can get.

That said, I did gang a couple speedlights together - after putting them in Ziploc bags to protect them from the rapidly falling snow - to overcome the sun in a few shots. For instance, the above shot was in full daylight, but I was able to underexpose the background through a combination of high-speed sync (1/500th) and two SB-600s fired at full power with no modifiers. I put one SB-600 on a light stand as normal, and used a Justin clamp to stick the other one in roughly the same position to avoid divergent shadows as much as possible. In retrospect, I could and should have put them even closer together, as the shadows do look a little wonky. Plus, the light is obviously really hard - this would have been an ideal time to have a more powerful studio strobe with enough excess power that I could have put a softbox or at least a beauty dish on it. But then again, there’s no way I would have been lugging around a battery pack for such a strobe on a day like this.

The speedlights in all these shots were triggered with RadioPoppers, as I don’t trust Nikon’s CLS system to work 100% in broad daylight. Incidentally, I’ve been frustrated by the fiddly mounting system of the RadioPopper PX receivers, so instead of using them yesterday, I just used gaffer tape to stick them to the flashes. That was much more effective than those plastic mounts, and I didn’t have to worry about them falling off at all. I also covered the battery compartment of the RadioPopper transmitter with gaffer tape to seal it from moisture - not sure if that was necessary but it definitely made me feel better.

Later, as the sunlight faded, I was able to get a little more creative with the lighting and save my batteries a bit, as in the above shot. This one was done with an SB-800 and an SB-600 ganged through a shoot-thru umbrella, both at 1/8 power and with full CTO gels, along with an SB-600 with 1/4″ grid spot lighting the background (also at 1/8 power I believe). This shot is obviously a bit too “artsy” to be used as a promo pic, but it’s one of my favorites from the day.

There were some unique challenges with this shoot. Because it was so cold and Margot’s outfits were not exactly warm, we retreated to Starbucks or Soho Tea & Coffee after each shoot to warm up. In other words: condensation city. About halfway through the day my D700 focusing screen fogged up, on some internal surface I couldn’t clean. I actually did one of our shoots - the one from which the below photo comes - shooting almost blind; luckily the condensation didn’t affect the image or the autofocus functionality, but it certainly meant that I couldn’t give Margot any feedback as she was posing - because I couldn’t see her!

Here’s a set of some of my favorites from the day. Check out Margot’s music at Myspace.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 11:35 am and is filed under Lighting & Studio, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.