Marisa Hoyt

Here's hoping I never have to see this shell ever again! This shell drove me crazy and in retrospect was not an ideal model for this lighting exploration. I spent many hours this Sunday rearranging my kitchen, testing out lamps and forcing my kids to hold pieces of tissue paper and reflectors. When I went searching around for an item to photograph I discovered we don't have a lot of things laying around with texture that are also light or white colored. My daughter convinced me to settle on this shell, so I did. And now as I'm posting these I'm regretting it. I'm not sure she would have helped me if I'd chosen something else, though.

I do think I managed to photograph light in the 10 different ways we were supposed to for the assignment. However, I do not love these images at all. I will say I learned a LOT about how to set up lighting scenes and focus light in different ways. I was very grateful for my tripod in this situation and could not have done this without one. The slower shutter speed and need to be holding a flashlight/filter/etc with one (or two) hands would have made it impossible. I found the backlighting to be the most difficult lighting situation to set up in this situation. It was challenging to position a light behind the subject without casting funny shadows through the paper. I also found the concentrated light to be a challenge but think if I had a different or larger subject that may have been easier. My favorite image was the light painting image and I definitely had more fun experimenting with that. My daughter (aka my helper) thought that was fun to watch and she had never really seen anything like that before. I love how there is so much contrast between the black background and the light color of the shell. I was trying to get a trail of light to show up but was not successful with that. I was using an LED flashlight (with paper wrapped in a cone shape around it) and am wondering if the LED makes that harder than a regular white light? The LED could also have made the concentrated light image more of a challenge, too.

I'm looking forward to applying these lighting principles to future work in portrait photography. I think many of these techniques can really enhance a portrait and help highlight a subject in a distinct way.

Here is a behind the scenes look at what we had set up. This was just one of the many different staging scenes we used to get the right photo.