Christmas card shoot - the setup

[jetrim]

Thought it might be fun/helpful to post a few of the "behind the scenes" captures from the shoot done just before Christmas (see Happy Holidays everyone! ). This was a surprisingly difficult setup to nail down. Because of the desire to capture the luminance of the christmas lights and fiber-optic tree, the big studio pack lights couldn't be used (they would have washed everything out). Instead, we opted to go with a single Quantum as the key light, bounced into a pair of reflectors, and a 400ws Alien Bee at it's lowest power setting as the kicker. We had tried a CTO filter on the kicker to warm things up a bit, but even with the monolight set to 1/32nd power, it seemed to make no appreciable difference (it can be seen laying on the floor in the back left corner). The exposure required to get the christmas lights to show, turned out to be 1/8th second, f/4, ISO 200. The models had a tough time staying completely still for that length of time resulting in only a handful of decent shots coming out of a 2 hour session (+2 hours to figure out the setup)