Last Saturday we went out into the sun flooded fields with Rae for some portraiture work. As usual I had my fellow Elinchrom Ranger, two strobe heads and modifiers with me…

More after the jump!

First we set up under a tree to benefit of the shade and get a better basis for the lighting than in the open sun. I used one head with a quadra softbox camera right and from some distance to get a basic light on the entire scene. I kept it low and pointed slightly upwards to throw some light into the upper branches as well. The second light, equipped with a strip softbox (without the outer diffusion), was used to light Alicia from camera left.

Exposure was derived from a spot measurement of the sky which gave me f/8 at 1/180s. Based on this I chose the power of the lights to match the exposure on Alicia. I didn’t want the typical key shift on this as is seen so often these days. In fact I dropped the shutter to 1/125s after a while to catch half a stop more of the ambient…

So far so good. Alicia even found an old moldy broom under the tree, as if it were waiting there to be found. It’s fun when your props develop a live of their own

So, I finally get to the point of simplicity as suggested in the title of this post. After the tree business we decided to get Alicia into the surrounding fields of rye (at least I believe it was rye…). There were no farmes in sight so we placed her a few feet in and I set up my lights. I wanted to go with only one head through the quadra from high up and then reflect some light back into her face with an Aurora lite panel. Due to the very harsh sunlight I felt I needed to do some serious key shifting wether I wanted or not to get a cool look. I dialed my aperture to f/16 and started to rev up the power on the Ranger when I noticed that it kept firing without me even touching anything… there it went… pop!… 1… 2… 3… pop!… 1… 2… 3… pop!… I figured there must me something jamming the frequency of the Skyport triggers so I switched channels… pop!… 1… 2… 3… pop!…

I turned everything off an back on again… pop!… 1… 2… 3… pop!…

OK, let’s move away a bit and see if it works elsewhere, I thought.  After all it worked like a charm under the tree which was just a few meters away. Nope… pop!… 1… 2… 3… pop!… So I went back to the tree. Everything works just fine again - we’re in business. So back to the field… pop!… 1… 2… 3… pop!…

I fiddled for some 10 minutes, losing my temper and coming off very uncool (after all it was the hottest day of the year thus far!), when my beloved girlfriend and assistant suggested we work just with the reflectors.  Now there’s an idea! After all, we had been working that way all the time before we got the strobe equipment. I was pretty frustrated that I had lugged five grand worth of lighting equipment through the blazing sun and not be able to use it now. But hey, I popped the first few frames and realized that this was working out really well. Much more natural, much faster, much more personal…

And there’s your proof: Simple still works!!! Or as a good friend and fellow photog told me: “Sometimes the gear just fails, so we’re forced to do it another way once in a while!” Very true!

And simple it is: We just moved Alicia into the shade the nearby tree was casting, Andrea picked up the sun light camera left with the Aurora Panel and filled in Alicia’s face. I dropped the exposure to f/9.5 and all was good… All images shown are out of the box, no processing done…

So remember: Keep it simple once in a while!

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Posted by nicolas_henri on June 24th, 2008 :: Filed under Photography, Set
Tags :: Equipment Gear Ranger Sun Panel Simple, Reflector
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