Portraits in the Woods with Meg

It's great to have cooperative friends.  Lately, I've been feeling like I've been stuck in a rut with my lighting.  I used pretty much the same setups, because I could set them up fast, and I knew what they'd do on the job.  But they were the same, and I was getting bored.  So a few weeks ago, I posted on facebook that I wanted to go take my lights into the woods near my house and play that weekend, and if anyone was interested to join me, that'd be super.  No one was free, and I ended up not going out that weekend.  And then a while later, my friend Meg called a couple weeks later... she had read my post a while back, and was in the need of some new headshots for work stuff and whatnot, and thought that the whole idea of trekking out into the woods would be neat.  And she thought snow would add an extra dimession of awesomeness.  A quick peak at weather.com showed some snow on the next Sunday, so the next thing I knew, I was carting my lights and sandbags on a not-so-off-road-capable cart out into the snowy wilderness with Prof. Meg to try some things that I hadn't tried before.  The Rocky Point Resource Managment Area is near where I live, and it happens to be the old RCA  Radio Central, so there are all sorts of weird structures in the woods, and many creatively graffittied.  Meg was unbeliveably accomodating with my requests, and even snuggled up close to a snowy conrete pump something or other (I gave her a sandbag to keep her comfortable, so she didn't have to sit directly in the snow, I'm not super mean or anything), and we made some cool photographs together.

After Superstorm Sandy, I got a Vagabond Mini Lithium, so that I could run our internet when the power was out, rather than running an extension cord to an inverter in the car, and so lately I've been using my Alien Bee studio lights again, and this setup came in really handy with these shots of Meg, and I have to say, it's a whole lot of fun to play with big lights in the middle of the woods.  I did mix some speedlights in, but I had to crank them up to full power, for some of the shots (hung one on a boom over the graffittied pump room), and with the cold, the recycle time seemed like an extra-eternity.

Anywho, as I mentioned earlier, I was trying to go for a lighting scenario that was different from what I usually do, so using grids, swapping hard and soft light, etc. and going for a more stylized look… I think they came out pretty cool!

Thanks for playing, Meg!

-Sam