Melissa

Melissa was another willing victim subject at our Sunday studio session (alliteration win!). I came back from a lunch-meeting just in time to sneak into the shoot-in-progress and capture some portraits of this lovely young lady (7 weeks pregnant too!).

If this shots looks really fuzzy it’s because I had a chance to use the much lauded Canon 85mm f/1.2. This lens is pretty crazy because of that razor thin depth of field. If Melissa (or I) moved half an inch front or back I’d have lost focus on her eyes… and believe me, I have a lot of out-takes where I did. Dave, the owner of this beast of a lens, had brought his huge wattage power packs, that were actually incapable of firing at a low enough power level for us to properly expose our subjects at f/1.2.

The solution to this was less power (of course) by using strobes, diffused. This was shot with a 580exII through a Lastolite ezybox softbox at 1/128th power (I think) with a sto-fen diffuser on. Rim light is also provided by a 580exII at the same power level using the 1/8 honl grid. Fill to camera left was compliments of a Lastolite trigrip reflector.

Posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 9:45 pm. Filed under: Portraits Tags: dof, portrait, Strobist RSS 2.0 feed.