Adobe’s Creative Voices:
I have always loved the lighting that comes out of hollywood movies – It’s amazing to see how every character is always perfectly lit regardless of the circumstances in which they happen to be and that’s something I consistently strive for when lighting up my sets.
Gear Selection:
Vistek was kind enough to sponsor me the gear that I would be using for this shoot. I chose a set of battery powered Elinchrom Ranger Quadras which have the best power/weight ratio on the market – capable of delivering 400 watts of power each at my disposal. The slower S heads were selected so that I would be able to hypersync with my PocketWizards in the event that the sun was too bright.
As for light modifiers, I simply selected a Beauty Dish for a slightly larger directional light, Deep Octa for a focused octobox, and a pair of softboxes great for side lighting.
Planning the light:
I like using multiple tools: SunSeeker on location to understand the lay of the land and select the angle at which I’ll be shooting and the free SunCalc to simply remind myself when I’m at a computer and want to get a better idea of how it looks overall.
Planning:
From there, I use a nifty little program called Paper to sketch out doodles on my iPad. Despite the fact that I have absolutely no drawing skills whatsoever, the application + a nifty little pen called “Jot Pro
If you don’t do this yet, taking a couple minutes to brief your team before a shoot will make the setup go significantly faster.
Shoot Day:
Finally once all the pieces are placed, there’s nothing left to do but to adapt to whatever situation comes up. There are always going to uncontrollable factors – in our case, wind, clouds and a chance of rain.
But with the right combination of planning and experience… it makes things easy 🙂
Check out some before and after’s in last week’s video by Neil Austen at Fly Home Freedom:
Last week: Preproduction with Adobe
Full gear list:
- Nikon D800E: B&H | Amazon
- Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8
- Pocketwizard Flex TT5
- Elinchrom Ranger Quadra
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