"Color My World"

"Color My World"
©David A. Ziser

Here is an image I made during this weekend's Bat Mitzvah celebration. This is the second event I photographed for the family so it was fun to be a part of their beautiful celebration over the weekend.

The decor at the evening party was over the top. Event designer and good friend, Joe Rigotti, always does a "knock out" jobs with parties in which he plans. This weekend's party was no exception. Each of the rooms of the Kenwood Country Club where the celebration was held was completely transformed into four oases of color. It made for a very cool atmosphere for the party.

Before the guests arrive and the party begins, I love to photograph the family  and especially our special celebrant among the fun surrounds of the event. Today's image shows our guest of honor among the very cool, no pun intended, blue room. This was the first room the guests entered as they arrived at the party.

The challenge was the lighting in each room - it was so vibrant. Illuminating my subject with my wide light dispersion shoot through Zumbrella surely would have diluted the surrounding colors. To preserve the look of the decor, I needed to use a light source with a much more narrow "cone of light". I decided to use my famous Z-Ray. It filled the bill nicely.

I had our guest of honor strike an easy pose, worked for a great expression, lit her with my Z-Ray from the left and got a cool portrait. The nice thing about the Z-Ray is that it is a continuous light source so it's easy to see how the light falls and easily place a loop lighting pattern on our subject's face.

Since the “cone of light” is so narrow, it never really affects or changes the lighting decor in the room.

Another challenge is the time you have to get these images - it's only a matter of minutes because the guests are starting to arrive. We finished about 86 images of the family and our guest of honor in 17 minutes. We got some awesome images and the clients loved the results (and the fact that we were able to pull it off quickly.)

Camera specs: Canon 5D Mark II fitted with Sigma 12-24mm lens at 12mm, F 5.0 @ 1/20 second, ISO 1600. Enjoy! -David