By far this is one of my favorite images in the recent times, There is a very interesting story behind this image I was in Columbus Ohio for two days working on a project with my friend Yogesh who also happens to be a awesome art director. After a long day of shoot we both went to eat at his wife's restaurant. we were sitting and planning our next day where we were suppose to do a lot of post production work and wrap the shoot as well. All of a sudden I saw two very interesting faces standing and talking to “Uma”, Yogesh’s wife. I asked Yogesh who are they; he told me they are our regular guests and come here often as they just love the Indian food. he questioned me back why are you asking about them? I said, that something just came in my head and I really would like to do that, upon which he looked back at me with a weird look and said what? I said, Look at their faces dude, aren’t they amazing, let’s go and talk to them. He said, what about our work, I told him we will finish that in time. I explained Yogesh what was in my mind in terms of lighting and he looked at me and said hmmmmmm, sure lets do it, because he is as crazy as I am when it comes to creating art. He introduced me to them and I started talking and explaining to them the concept. They were real sport and said yes. Otherwise people think a photographer from New York, ummmm let me think again. Lol, no it’s not like that. Photographers from New York are well respected; we decided to shoot the next morning at 9.a.m in Yogis’ home studio. I was really excited to do this shoot and was looking forward to it.
Now came the time where we were thinking how we will finish our work and still do this shoot. Both of us decided to work all night and finish the post production work, even though it was tough but like I always say
anything for a good picture. We worked all night till 6.am and woke up at 8.am since our models arrived before time. It was the husband wife and there their two kids. I wanted to set up the lights for the Edgy three light gritty look. Ideally I would like 2 medium sized soft boxes with chimera grids and a beauty dish for such a set up, but we had 2 Profoto heads with one large soft box and one umbrella and for the third light we had a Nikon speed light SB800. The challenge here for me was to create the right highlights on the right spots and they have to be equally distributed and balanced. I used the SB800 as the key light which is replacing the beauty dish; it will illuminate the forehead and the nose. The other two lights were placed on the right and left of the model; I had to move the lights at different distances several times just to get the right exposure since there is very little room for any spill light in this kind of set up I had to flag the lights, we used a spare door sitting in his garage, we used the black side of the umbrella as a black bounce and of course a white reflector under the models chest to give that little highlight on his collar bone It took almost a hour and half to finally get the right exposure and setup. Finally we started shooting and working on his expressions and at the end I got what I was looking for. I can’t tell you guys how satisfying it is to achieve something you have visualized and especially in a situation like this. I did a different lighting setup for his wife just to make her look softer and prettier. I will talk about her image soon, we also wrapped our actual assingment in time and i got on my flight back to NY in time.
chao.
