Our Alien Bees B400 monolights arrived yesterday, and I’m spending a couple of hours this morning working with them, just to get some idea of how they’re going to perform. So far, I’m pretty pleased.
Image may be NSFW.
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This image is a difficult one, and it’s what I decided to attempt first — a mostly black subject with lots of detail against a blown-out white background.
Our muslin backgrounds are anything but flat. In fact, they’re really, really wrinkled, and don’t really hang all that well. In this case, it’s also been flipped up onto the posing bench to act as the “base” for the model. So, I really, really wanted it to go away.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
So, here’s the lighting setup:
- The locomotive is set a few feet in front of the background, and is primarily lit only with one strobe and a shoot-through umbrella, from about 3 feet above and to the left of the model. It’s at 1/2 power.
- The background is blown out with the second light, again about 3 feet above the model, aimed so the “hot spot” is directly behind the locomotive, and set at 3/4 power.
- The exposure is in manual mode, of course, 1/80th second at f/9.0 to maintain sharpness for the entire length of the model, which is at about a 30 degree angle to the camera. The ISO is set to 100.
This was all set up without the aid of a flash meter. I’m not 100% sure that it would have sped the process up any for this lighting setup, though maybe it would have. I guess it would have more easily allowed me to figure the exposure for the model, and how much more light I would need to blow out the background, by manually “popping” the flashes. In the long run, I probably will want one. There’s certainly no going “P for Professional” in this kind of rig.
