Last night's shot of Pumbaa (I've been spelling the poor pig's name wrong since January 2nd) was a somewhat standard headshot type portrait, except I used a stuffed pig.
Tonight's shot is a little different. It's still a headshot, in the most technical sense, but conveys a completely different mood due to lighting and shooting angle.
This is a pretty big set up to light a stuffed pig.
Ambient is cut down to zero.
Fill is the 160WS strobe, through the big softbox, on-axis and down into the pig. It's set at a little over 1/8 (we'll get to that)
Key are two bare 430EZs, from the sides, at 35mm and 1/8 (again, pretty high power for a small studio).
Accent is the 580EX II at 1/4 through the built-in diffuser and a dark blue gel (once more, lots of sauce).
The flashes were set to retina-searing intensities because I had my lens stopped down to f/5.6. I knew when I was making this shot that I was going to take it into Photoshop for some high-pass action, and to get the most benefit from the high-pass filter, I wanted as much detail as possible, hence the smaller aperture.
Because aperture controls flash intensity, each stop smaller on the lens required me to set my flashes one stop higher in the power department to keep the correct lighting amounts and ratios. I normally shoot Pumbaa at f/2.8, so, stopping down to f/5.6 required two additional stops of power out of the flashes. Easy, right?
So, we've got a stuffed pig looking as menacing as a stuffed pig can look. I thought the bugs were a nice touch.
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