A shot in front of the pond. Lit by an SB-25 in a shoot-through umbrella to camera left, and a bare gelled SB-26 to camera right, for hairlight
Got a light meter recently, and I must say, incident metering is absolutely, immensely awesome. I can now just stick the meter right up in someone’s face and get a perfect exposure straight-off: no chimping or guessing. And as an added bonus, it even tells you how much of the exposure is made up by flash and ambient. So, new meter in hand, I took a trip out to the recently opened Robinson Preserve, to give it a little test run, and have fun in the park, of course.
Strictly speaking, I guess you could say I took two trips to Robinson Preserve. My girlfriend, Danielle, oh-so-nicely agreed to help out for both of them. The first time we went out, it was already getting close to sunset, so I set her in front of a pond, on a rock, with some trees in the background, threw up an umbrella and hairlight, and just got in some relatively quick shots. And then it rained. Thankfully, nothing got too destroyed from the water, and as it turns out, photographic umbrellas will, in fact, shield you, your girlfriend, and your equipment from rain. As near as I can tell, there haven’t been any adverse side-effects on the umbrella, other than it having been a little damp for some time.
A shot from the second session, atop the observation tower. Lit by a single CTO-gelled SB-25, to camera right (and firmly secured to the railing, of course)
A couple days later, we came back an hour or two before the sun went down, so we had a little more time to work with. My first idea was to put her up on top of the observation tower with a light up there, and shoot from down below (you gotta love Pocket Wizards). The shot sort of worked, but the sky, unfortunately, was in no mood to give up any sort of decent looking background: nothing but bleak, pale-yellow, hazy sunset sky. So I just more or less ignored those shots: a couple are still sitting on my hard drive, but they’ll probably be there forever. I would definitely like to retry the concept, but with better skies. Also a longer lens, as I was just barely getting a decent full-body shot at 200mm. It sure would be nice to give it a try with the 400mm f/5.6 I rented up in Canada, but those are mighty expensive, so it’ll have to wait, for now.
A more pensive Danielle. Same lighting setup as before, this time shooting at a steeper angle.
After that, though, I went back up and shot from the deck, which worked much better. Also, since we were on the middle level of the tower, I was able to climb the stairs a little to get up higher and shoot down, which you’ll see in the second shot, to get a nice watery background (the entire tower is surrounded by water). I should note that the meter worked exactly as expected in both situations, which is to say excellently (for anyone wondering, it’s the Sekonic L-358 I’m talking about). Now I just have to hold off on the urge to buy the Pocket Wizard transmitter add-on for it, so I can go totally wireless with just the meter, and not have to worry about manually tripping my lights. In the mean time, though, it’s working fine, and Danielle is proving to be an excellent model: and you can’t beat one that’ll work for dinner.
Robinson Preserve is definitely showing promise as a portrait location. These two sessions are the only ones I’ve really done since the park has opened, and I’ve already found two excellent locations within a 15 minute walk of the parking lot (one within a half minute walk). There’s still a lot of awesome locations that I saw when I initially visited, and no doubt many more that I haven’t seen hiding in all the miles of trails. My biggest problem will be taking note of the ones closest to the park’s entrances (apparently there’s another entrance further South that I’ll need to investigate), as it can be a pretty long walk to get back into the trails. While I can certainly drag myself back there, it would be pretty difficult, I’m sure, to get a paying client back that far, unless they were a particularly intrepid outdoors-person. That’s all a matter for a different day, though. For now, I’m extremely satisfied just with the couple of locations I’ve scouted out, and excited to find more.
Tags: Danielle, Light Meter, photography, Robinson Preserve, Sekonic