To date, my digital specialist Andrew Johnson and I have photographed a broad spectrum of assignment based subjects. From hotels to jewelry to bowls of hot soup. It is not the bulk of our work, but does break things up a bit and offers a chance to peek into the world of what other people see and make. There is a handful of artists here in Fairbanks that we photograph for, some of their work requires visits off site, but much of it is done in our office. We don’t have a large studio, but convert our small space into a necessary workspace. Yesterday, we photographed the work of Margo Klass, an outstanding artist who creates very unique 3 dimensional mixed media work. The pieces on average are one to two feet, with subjects inside a box. Openings on the top and sides of the box allow light to fall on the interior subjects and the goal in photographing her pieces is to create some drama in this respect. Here is a terrible quality photo of our set up, that I quickly took with my I-phone, but it shows our make-shift studio for this project.
Studio set-up includes 3 ETTL flashes and one softbox.
A long piece of white paper serves as the backdrop. We overpowered all ambient light in the room with three ETTL flashes, controlled manually by a fourth master flash on the camera. The main light source was behind a small soft box, and sometimes one or two other flashes were hand held and snooted or scrimmed in order to add light through the openings in the boxes. Here are a few of the finished shots. I’d recommend checking out her website for a peek at more of her work.
Lit with one softbox, no accent lighting.
Lit with one softbox as the main light, and one direct flash, partly scrimmed, adding light through a hole in the box on the right side.
Mixed media construction by Margo Klass
Mixed media construction by Margo Klass
