How I Shot It: “Lily” by Chris Pino

In this edition of “How I Shot It,” Chris Pino explains how he shot a photo of a beautiful female model he calls “Lily.”  It reached a high of #38 on Flickr’s Explore list, and is a fantastic example of a shot taken indoors with one AlienBees B1600 and a Nikon D3.

“This shot of my model, Lily, was the last set-up of the whole shoot. She had just moved into an old brownstone in North Philly only a few days before. The weather took a turn for the worst, so we decided to shoot inside. The house had tons of character and really awesome colored walls.

After shooting a few other places in the house and a bunch of different set-ups with different outfits she came out with this intense orange colored dress on. I knew exactly what I wanted once I saw the color of the dress.

The set-up is quite simple and gives a very unique feel. My initial thought was that I really wanted to use a ringflash for the image, but since I do not have a ringflash I used the next closest thing: a beauty dish. Now I usually shoot most of my work on the telephoto side of things so my widest lens is the Nikon 50/1.8. I was a little hesitant to use this lens as it is not optically the best lens by any means. I decided to take my chances and just use the lens. Now shooting in a small room at 50mm isn’t the easiest thing to do. Things were very cramped and my back was against the far wall. Back to the lighting set-up. Since I wanted to emulate the feel of a ringflash I put my beauty dish on an Alien Bee B1600 and boomed it out right on axis. The light was about head height and I was shooting from the floor. I used a PocketWziard Plus II on the camera and one on the light to trigger the flash. For optimum exposure I used my Sekonic L-758DR light meter to meter the flash. I got a meter reading of f/3.5 with the B1600 on lowest power. I used a shutter speed of 1/250 to knock down the ambient light on the room behind her as to not distract any attention from her. ISO100 was used to attain the cleanest image quailty as well. Here is a quick diagram I drew out of the set-up:

As far as post processing goes the image was imported into Adobe Lightroom 2.2 for basic editing. Nikon “Camera Vivid” camera calibration profile was applied and slight tweaks of exposure, black points and curves were also made. The idea is to get the best possible “digital negative” in Lightroom. The image was then exported to Adobe Photoshop CS4 for further editing. The skin was refined using the patch tool, healing brush and curves adjustments layers. It was then exported into Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro to make the colors really pop (great program by the way). A slight unsharp mask was applied as well. After the adjustments were made it was saved back into Lightroom as a 16-bit TIFF file. At this point the image was done and ready for print, or this case the web.

The lighting technique used is very simple as you can see, but gives awesome and unique results. It may take some time to perfect the height and angle of the light but just keep working with it. ”

Thanks for taking the time to explain how you set this shot up Chris. Please visit his Flickr photostream to leave him comments and view his numerous other pictures in Explore.