I was hired a couple of weeks ago by a Magazine in Abu Dhabi, UAE to shoot an Iraqi University of Oregon student for a story about students leaving the Middle East to go to school in the US. For the story I needed 2 or 3 different locations as it would be used as a possible cover and inside spread. I had about 30 minutes with the subject, Awab to make a few different photos. My direction from the editor was “try to make it not look like Dubai.” Ha! That shouldn’t be too hard in Oregon! Click the jump for more photos, thought process and lighting diagrams…

My assistant Liz and I arrived on Campus about an hour before the shoot to scout locations and get a game plan going. It was raining in Portland when we left so we were thinking it might need an indoor location. However, when we arrived, it was sunny and even warm-ish. Great! but it was 11am and the light was pretty harsh. A great solution to harsh light is to backlight your subject. I also wanted to show a bit of the campus, so we found a backlit area with some cool looking buildings in the background. Now we had our first location, so next we walked a couple blocks and found another place that would work and show a bit of campus life, i.e., bikes and people, but again harsh light. No worries. This would be the second spot. Then we found a really modern and cool looking building, completely different looking from the first two to use as the third spot.

We were trying to travel light, since we’d be walking a lot so we packed a couple of speedlights and a scrim. On the first two shots, we shot the speedlights through the scrim to make the light source bigger. On the top image (#1 on the diagram) the scrim was used to block the sun and put the subject in shadow and the lights were shot through it to mimic the sunlight, but still give me control of it. For image #2, we just shot right through the scrim to make the light source softer on the subject. The backlight does a nice job of providing a rim light.

For image #3, again, the sun was an issue, so we used the scrim to block out the sun and put the subject in shadow so we could have more control of the light, the sun was now diffused and made for a nice fill light too. Then I put a speedlight with a small softbox in front of him and laid on the ground to get a low dramatic angle and show off the cool building.

Here is how the lighting was setup:

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Editorial, Other, Workshops. 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.