POTD 4 of 365

Perhaps it's because I just read Stephen King's "The Library Policeman", or perhaps it's because The Missus revels in her Librarian-ness, but, today's shot makes use of deliberately threatening lighting.

Remember when you were a kid, and you held a flashlight under your chin to tell ghost stories?  Yeah, neither do I, because nobody did that.  Remember when you were a kid, and you saw somebody on TV holding a flashlight under his chin to tell ghost stories?  Right.  This is kind of like that.



This was a really easy shot, and, frankly, more time could have been spent to minimize the shadows from the book, but, when The Missus consents to modeling, one does not waste any time.

This is, so far, the most post-processing I've done on a shot for this project.  The first three were tweaked in a bit in Digital Photo Pro (sharpening, lens correction, contrast), converted to JPG, and posted.

I took this into Photoshop for a tiny bit of high-pass punch.

This is is the non-shopped version:



Finally, the setup:



Looks much less threatening there, doesn't she?  Proof positive that lighting is wonderful for setting the mood of a shot. Well, that, and deliberately keeping the fuzzy slippers out of the frame.

What we've got here are two flashes, triggered with the cheapies.

The 580EX at 1/64 with a Strobies Honeycomb Diffuser is positioned at camera right, below The Missus, angled up toward her face.

The 430EZ is at 1/16 and has a Roscoe Purple Gel on it, and is on the floor behind The Missus, to light the backdrop.