This week I shot a promotional photo for the band Shed Nuisance. The band practices in an old shed (which is where the name comes from) so it seemed natural to me to incorporate the shed in the photo. I wanted to give the band a bit of a gritty look, so I chose split lighting for a dramatic effect and planned on doing some post shoot work in Photoshop.

I’m interested in any comments or thoughts you have on the photos. Please post your comments.

Here is a set up shot and more detail on how I made the photo.

The Lighting Set Up

I used a three light set up. Two strobes are placed at 45 degrees behind the band members, one at camera left and one at camera right creating the split light effect. This positioning also gives a nice rim light effect (highlight outlining the models) creating separation from the background. I use Pocket Wizard Plus II wireless triggers to remotely fire these lights.

There are two gobos (the cardboard squares on stands) to keep the light from hitting and flaring in my camera lens. I position myself with the gobos between me and the lights for shooting so I am in the shadow they create.

The third flash in the center is high over my shooting position and adds fill light to the front of the band members filling in the harsh shadow created by the split lighting. I used an umbrella on this light to soften the light and allow it to wrap around a bit. This light, a SB800 strobe, is triggered by the light from the slpit lights with a SU-4 Wireless Remote TTL Flash Controller. If I had another pocket wizard I would have used it, but I only have 3 and the third is on my camera to fire the other two.

The Exposure

I set my ambient exposure (for the background) to be about a stop and a half under exposed (a little dark). Then I adjusted the power output of the two split rim lights so that they looked good; not too bright or hot, but bright enough to give the nice rim light effect. I had an assistant stand in each of the locations I planned to have a band member at and shot a test frame. Once I was happy with the way it looked, I brought in the overhead umbrella light and adjusted it’s power output so that it would fill in the harsh shadow created on the front of the models by the split lighting.

The Post Production

I begin as I always do by adding three adjustment layers; levels, curves and hue and saturation. With these I make my basic corrections for white and black point, contrast, and color saturation respectively. I adjusted the contrast slightly higher than I normally do and I also intentionally left the color balance a bit cool.

During the photo shoot, I shot test frames that indicated an issue with the snow. Being so reflective, it was over exposed. Therefore I duplicated the base layer, darkened it until the snow looked better and then added a layer mask with a gradient to allow the original layer with the properly exposed upper portion to show through.

Next I wanted to blur the shed in the background a bit to keep focus forward on the band and reduce the busyness. I masked off the band members so that they would not be blurred and applied the guazian blur filter on the background.

To create the gritty effect I was going for, I again created a new layer and applied a lot of sharpening which pumpied up the contrast. I added so much that it looked bad. Then by reducing the opacity of that layer it blended in with the original bringing it back to a point that was acceptable to my eye.

As a final step I added a vignette to the photo darkening the edges. A viewers eye tends to go to areas of highlight and darkening the edges helps hold the viewers eye on the band members’ faces and not wander off the edge of the frame. This is a technique Ansel Adams used often, although not as dramatically as I did here.