Day 43 Friday 2nd Dec 2011 Workshop

10:00 Studio practice workshop:
We started the day by being assigned lighting plans with sets that needed to be built correspondingly. Once the sets were built Jonathan and Emily demonstrated how they worked, deconstructing lighting by demonstrating each aspect

Set One (Studio One)

Set two (group I, my group, studio two)

Set three (studio two)

Set three matched the criteria I had perfectly for my proposed Portrait shoot (which I'd blogged yesterday)

Set three again

Following on from building the sets, we were asked to deconstruct them and return the materials to stores.
We had a small task to do over lunch which consisted of supplying our lighting reference image(s) and a quick lighting plan based on that image and our proposed visual style for our portrait shoot.

Once we returned and Jonathan collated them we were grouped roughly into four groups based on the lighting style we wanted to test. For me this was Set three (above) and we were tasked with re-building the lighting sets and completing some test images, which we did during the course of the afternoon.

Like most people I HATE making mistakes, especially when they affect other people and today after getting home I realised that had made such an error. It's most annoying but after scanning today's negs this evening it was obvious they were underexposed and soon the penny dropped.

Upon checking my light meter I realised I'd left the ISO set at 100, when I'd loaded 400 ISO film (because that is what i had to hand), bugger!

A School boy error and worse still since I shared my film and light meter with Nikita  it's affected her images too. So I 'll apologise for that.


On a plus side, as test shots they still demonstrate the main effects we attempted to achieve. The whole process would have been perfect if the ISO had been correct on the light meter.
The image is underexposed (by two and a half stops since were where supposed to be overexposing by half a stop, and I underexposed by two stops) which is the outcome of my error. But you can see see the effects of the inclusion on a front reflector for example.

Background lighting

Radio slave system to initiate the flash (transmitter)

Radio slave system to initiate the flash (receiver)

Overall set up which I'll be using for real next Friday.

Scanned negative. Underexposed (see main body of text for explanation)

Scanned negative. Underexposed (see main body of text for explanation)

Scanned negative. Underexposed (see main body of text for explanation)

Scanned negative.  This image is also washed out,  due to the poly board reflector that we included as an experiment.

In conclusion I learnt a great deal from the mistakes.

The incorrect ISO setting on the light meter (first time I've done that, and a careless oversight). Secondly in the last image I included a reflector, but I never took a new light meter reading (another oversight always take a light meter reading!! Preferably with one that is set up right also!)