Last Friday night we had an opportunity to shoot two toddlers and it was a blast. It was the first time I had worked on white seamless paper also. I have had this roll of paper for a while but have been needing to cut about 15 inches off the tube so it would fit the studio and this was the opportunity.
Shooting the toddlers I knew I wanted a little higher key effect than I had previously shot and it was going to be interesting to see if I could pull it off. What I had to work with were a couple of Elinchrom 600RX heads for main and an overhead hair/fill, an Alien Bees B800 flash head and one of my Canon EX850II speedlites. The B800 and speedlite were going to be my background lighting with a flag on the 850. The Elinchroms both had Rotalux Softboxes attached.
The Bees head and Speedlite were fired by Pocket Wizards (Plus II on the Bees and FlexTT5 on the speedlite which I was shooting in manual). The Elinchrom heads were fired by their own Skyport system. On the camera I had the MiniTT1 Pocket Wizard in the shoe and the Skyport Controller on top of the Wizard. As long as everything is powered up, this system seams to work fairly well. I do plan on another Bees B800 before another high key shoot though as the speedlight while strong enough simply could not keep up with the recycle rate of the powered heads.
Balancing the background lights was a fairly easy job as I simply adjusted each flash output until I had an equal blowout pattern on the back of the camera (so much for my light meter). I brought in the little M7M dispenser to use as a lighting subject to get the Elinchroms dialed in. While the dispenser was a wonderful tool for the toddlers to work with and keep their attention focused on remaining semi still (yeah!) it later became a point of contention a you can see form the image below. The composition is not what I would have liked it to be but you just got to understand, photographic control was not an issue at this point.
The working area for the children was about eight seven feet by five feet before they got too close to the back. By the second shot, I realized this was going to be a hit and miss proposition.
After about thirty five minutes of just letting the two of them roam around on the white seamless I had enough shots to work with. Al the ladies in the room were in stitches watching these two interact. I really think they found it amusing to watch me tray and get anything useful as it was looking really out of control for the most part.
Working at 1/200th of a second to freeze their motion as there was plenty of that, the aperture ran between f/9 and f/13 for the entire shoot. Using a little bit of desaturation on an image of the two of the children resulted in the following image.
Persistence and patience paid off in this shoot and it was just a whole bunch of fun putting it together. I’ll probably have some more images form this shoot up here in the next few days.
For now, take care... Doug
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