Student Shadows

I was recently contacted by a couple of junior highschool students who wanted to shadow me for their school project.  They are both interested in photography, so they wanted to see how a professional operates.  I thought they would have fun experiencing both sides of the lens, so I asked them to be the models and we could spend half a day testing out some different techniques.  I had just finished painting a new backdrop, so I was excited to test it out!

I kicked off the day with an ambitious idea.  Owen happens to be my son's friend, so I have seen him on Instagram and he has some mad puck-flipping skills.  I thought it would be fun to make the puck fiery and capture some motion blur.  This is a complicated setup, that I have never tried, so I warned them that it might take some adjusting.  And it did!  I often spend a lot of time perfecting lighting setups.  It's one of the aspects of the job.  

First, we needed the puck to reflect light.  I had some sparkly silver stickers that we covered the puck with.  I used a tight grid (10 degrees) and a red gel and pointed it where the puck should be while he's flipping it.  I turned on the model light and turned off the flash capability.  The method to capture the motion is called shutter drag.  I set the camera to a really slow shutter so that the red light and motion would both be picked up by the sensor.  On the other side, I set up my second Profoto B1 flash head with a 30 degree grid pointed at Owen's face.  This one was set to flash so that we would not have any motion blur on his face.  Overall, it's pretty cool, but I couldn't spend too much time perfecting it because I wanted to show them more!