Well I promised behind the scenes and tips and tricks so I though I would begin with how I lit and shot the Richard Hardiman Nomu poster.

What you will find here and in other posts is an insight into how I go about my shoots and my lighting setups. What you won’t find is lighting ratios and power settings mainly because they won’t really help you and also because I light very much by how a shot feels to me at the time, not to a formula and I will tune the image till I am happy with the result.

The cast for this shoot was:

Models: Richard Hardiman and Kim Senogles

Hair and Makeup: Diane Bessesen

Styling: Me

So where it all begins which is pretty much in my head…

To really be able to plan your lighting, you really have to be able to see the end result in your head. You are also going to have to be able to light what you have envisaged so this means you need to know what effects you can get from your various lighting equipment and how you can manipulate what you have to get the desired effect.

Really what this means is that having some fancy lights that you just throw up isn’t really going to work, you need to be able to light with your head, not your wallet, essentially a case of “More Brain = Better Light”

The Idea

For this shoot, I wanted to create the feel of a radio booth sort of with a 50’s style to it but not necessarily 100% authentic.

The place I always begin when planning a shoot is to decide on a background. I am really not a great fan of deep etched pics and I rather opt to shoot against a set or printed background which I must admit is easy for me as I have a state of the art HP3200 large format printer in-house.

For this shoot the background was simply going to be a wall covered in egg crates which really do give the studio sound proofed vibe when lit. You would think it’s easy to find egg crates wouldn’t you? Well let me tell you it isn’t.

The extended hunt for egg crates gave me plenty time to pan how I was going to light the shot. I wanted a top light studio sort of feel but I didn’t want too much light spilling onto the background from the top light so this meant gridding the top light which would give me more control over it. Next I wanted to focus the attention on the subjects so this probably meant a snooted light which would give me a nice controllable spot of light which I could further refine with a grid.

So that was the basics and the rest would be refined onset.

After finally finding egg crates that came in large bundle, basically enough that I could go into egg packing business, it was time to start building the set. I tried various options to get the egg crates to stick onto the wall but found that good old prestick worked the best.

Decorating the set

Once the egg carets were up it was time to really make it look like a studio. A huge advantage that photographers have is that cameras can’t see 3D like we can so it’s pretty easy to fool them by using objects that are correctly shaded. Take the On air sign, it’s just a 2D image I made up in Photoshop with some shading to give it the perception of depth but when you stick it up on the egg crates and shoot it, it takes on a 3D feel and looks like it may be a proper sign.

Having a printer in house really helps with set dressing

For the rest of the props, an old metal table we have in the studio would become the desk and then all that was needed was to add a few props like a coffee mug, some CD Covers, head phones (authentic ones would have bee great but we couldn’t find any and Richard had these at home).

The last thing that I needed was a microphone. I couldn’t find one that would work for the shot and I could have just faked one, the way I did the sign but I also wanted to bring more of the Nomu branding into the shot. That meant I had to figure out how to turn a Nomu tin into a microphone.

I usually get my best ideas at around 1am and in this case it was no different. The solution would be to stick a tea strainer onto the end of the tin to make it look like the mesh on a microphone. Fortunately the kitchen supply shop across the road from the studio had strainers that fitted perfectly so all that was needed further was to drill a hole in the bottom of the tin and to attach it to a light stand.

I thought of hanging it from a wire but it didn’t work well with the shot so the stand was the best option.

Lighting the shot.

Once I was happy with the basic set, I normally set up the basic lighting and then get the cast onto set at which stage I will fine tune the setup. I tend to work by starting with the main light and adding each light as I feel it’s needed.

The first light in this case was the top light, a Nikon Sb-900 with a Strobies Grid, mounted on a light boom pointing downwards.

Once I was happy with what I was getting I brought Kim on to the set and turned on the second naked SB-900 located camera left and set to low power.  A third SB-900 which had a Strobies snoot and grid fitted was located camera left and was primarily focused on Richard but also adjusted so it would spill over onto Kim.

Now it was time to throw some light on Kim and create a little drama on Richard and this was done using a SB-900 with a sliver bounce umbrella positioned camera right and the power of the naked SB-900 camera left was lowered.

This is the lighting setup that we used. I used Nikon Sb-900′s for this shoot for no reason other than that I have them and they worked for what I wanted to do with my lighting.

Gear used was:

• 4 x Nikon SB-900′s
• Strobies Grid and Snoot with grid
• Camera: Nikon D700 with Nikon 85mm f/1.4 lens
• Lights trigger by Bowens radio triggers

Shooting

We tried a few options and poses during the shoot, re arranged the props a few times and after a bit of Photoshopping we had the poster image which was emailed to Paul at Nomu that same afternoon.