"Making An Entrance"© David A. Ziser
Here is another shot I took while filming the Kelby Training video sessions a few weeks ago in Florida. I had to giggle about one of the comments posted last Friday concerning how the bride looked too beautiful to be a regular bride. Megan was indeed a lovely girl and because of her professionalism and demeanor will bring a lot of wonderful qualities to the training videos.
Anyway let's get right to this image. I thought the double doors would supply a really nice framing element around my bride. When I asked Megan to stand between each of the two doors, I noticed that the background was extremely dark. I had LaDawn use my Z-Ray flash and illuminate the painting behind the bride. Since I was balanced to daylight for the camera, I thought the tungsten back-light would give me some additional added warmth. This technique also allowed me to separate the bride from the background.
The next challenge was to get the light on the bride without flooding or blowing out the double doors with too much light. I handled the situation by removing the reflector from my Quantum flash, rolling up a magazine, and placing the rolled up magazine over the flash tube. I asked my assistant to target the very narrow cone of light right onto our bride's face. This kept the main illumination on the subject and reduced the "over-flash" substantially from falling on the double doors. I really like how the straight lines of the doors complement the S-curve of the bride standing between them. I was really happy with the finished result. Camera specs; Canon 40D fitted with 24-105 IS lens at 40mm, F5.6 @ 1/20 second, ISO 800. Enjoy! -David
David, I've got a new nickname for you. . . Zen Light Master! You come up so many ways to create light on your subjects or use the available light in so many creative ways. Enjoy your blog, keep pushing the envelope and sharing with us.
ReplyDeleteDr David Jones
Now Dave,
ReplyDeleteYou're gonna get me in trouble with my wife. I didn't exactly say she was "beautiful" (she certainly is by the way), I said she seemed much more comfortable in front of the camera than most brides would be.
Hmm... OK, never mind. I can see that I'm just digging myself in deeper and deeper.
Anyway, she's a lovely subject and you've done a great job with these images (as usual).
Jeff :-)
Honestly I don't see the greatness of the lighting as a final result. While there's a very good balance between ambient and main, the main is _far_ too blue, giving a very unnatural, almost pasty-looking pallor to the subject. Again, it looks to be about 2/3 stop underexposed overall. The only thing I can think is that you were trying to give the impression of the subject being moonlit. Full marks for the creativity involved in _creating_ the lighting setup, but the end result doesn't justify the amount of setup that went into this single shot.
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