Light Relay
I handled a portrait assignment the other day. This lady is a Sports Information Director at a local college here. She won an award we are doing a story about here at the paper.
During the interview I walked around looking for locations in the athletic facilities. I finally decided on the hall of fame. I quickly decided on using just two lights. A main light with the soft-box and a bare strobe hitting the wall behind my subject.
I carry two colored gels in my lighting bag. A red one and a blue one (some day I’ll put more in there). I thought using some color would jazz things up some. And since she had on a blue shirt I thought red might be a nice contrast. Then I remembered that the schools colors are blue and silver. So I went with the blue.
I shot some test images before my subject arrived and I quickly learned that my main strobe was not firing my background light. I was relying on photo-eye slaves since I didn’t have along any Pocket Wizards.
My quick workaround was to put down a third strobe on the floor with a photo-eye slave on it and set the power to 1/16th. This set up a relay of lights that would trigger my background light placed down the hallway.
I get a lot of satisfaction out of improvising solutions on the fly.
