Funny stuff

The original Unforgiven poster - ©Wikipedia

At the beginning of January, I was able to photograph long time FCC member and great photographer Palle Kjar. As Joe McNally would say, the guy has a great face for a picture. When we started the shoot, Palle asked me and the other photographer (Heather Simonds) what we had in mind. We had a few hats and outfits for Palle so I figured we would start off with something simple like a single light setup and add more lights and gradually get more complex. Palle agreed and said he was thinking of doing a parody of the Unforgiven poster. I could sort of remember the poster but I figured I may as well Google it to refresh my memory.

Of course, that just meant that we had to start figuring out the lighting setup right away. Which meant we may as well set up the lights and heck...we may as well shoot it. So much for starting simple! This was probably one of my most challenging lighting setups I've done yet. It wasn't too hard but there were some obstacles to overcome.

I didn't have any problems getting all the lights to fire but Heather did for some reason. To troubleshoot we turned stuff off and then wondered why they didn't fire later. (Oh yeah! Turn that back on now!) We had light spill on to our background so we had to get some gobos in the mix to keep the light off the back ground. Then our nice little light on Palle's hands was off so we had to readjust. Challenging for sure but darn was it actually a lot of fun. It didn't hurt that Palle was incredibly patient so that made things go a lot smoother.  In the end it was a four light setup. Two SB700s to act as rim lights around him. We had to gobo them to keep them from spilling light on the background as mentioned previously. A SB800 to spot light his hands. The pop up flash threw a bit of light over his back to give some more detail. The setup Looked roughly like picture below.

Like I said, it was a lot of fun. Once we finished with this one we switched to simple stuff but this was definitely the most notable of the bunch. I liked the result so much I entered it into the Foothills Camera Club "Humor" competition where it took first. (And got a few laughs when it was shown at the meeting).  I have to give full credit to Palle though. It was his idea and I was just the guy who happened to point the lights and the camera in the right direction.

"The Unforgiving" - click on the image to go to the photoset