Last week I did a photo shoot to create some marketing images for Kullman Ironworks. Caleb Kullman is a very talented artist-blacksmith that does beautiful custom metal work using many traditional blacksmithing techniques.

My challenge was to photograph Caleb working in his new shop. As you might image, the shop is not designed with great photographic lighting in mind. There are only two available light sources in the shop. The first is a small amount of window light. This is often a great soft directional light source, but in this instance the shop was just too big and the windows too small. The second is overhead fluorescent light. Overhead lighting just does not give me anything exciting to work with. So I opted to add my own light.

In this first shot I really wanted to capture the action of sparks flying off the anvil as Caleb was hammering the red hot steel. To get this, I needed to keep the background dark while keeping detail on Caleb in the foreground.

To get the dark background I underexposed the ambient light in the studio by two stops. I did this by dialing my shutter speed down to 1/30th of a second at f-5.6. At 1/30th of a second I new I would get the sparks streaking nicely and f-5.6 would give me the depth of field I wanted.

Next, I brought the foreground lighting up to a proper exposure using a SB28 strobe on a stand at camera right. I used a barn door light modifier to keep the light focused on the subject and from spilling onto the background. To create separation of Caleb from the background I placed a second SB28 strobe clamped to a shelf behind Caleb. On this light I used a snoot to keep the light beam tight on Caleb and out of the camera lens.

I chose to use hard light, not softened by any type of diffusion, because I thought it would work into the hard steel like theme of a blacksmith shop.

You can see the set up I used in the below photo taken by Jack Moseley who was assisting me.