Last weekend I went out to do a fashion shoot with Daniel (aka Midas iWrite) (MM#1564051). We had a great time. I wanted to get a very masculine, harsh look to the series, and I think we achieved that very well.

First we found a great location in Pioneer Square. An alley very near the one I used for the Fight Club shoot. This gave me a great setting, and we got there in the evening with plenty of light left in the sky, but because we were working in the shade it was soft and directionless. No worries, I was going to compensate for that with strobes.

For these first two shots I just rim-lit Daniel, with a strobe slightly behind and to each side. These were a Vivitar 283 and a Vivitar 285 speedlight. I didn’t use any modifiers because I wanted the light to be harsh and specular.

Next I moved David into this doorway. Because there’s no light bouncing into the doorway, it acts as a subtractive lighting scheme, so positioning him at the edge of the doorway I had a lot of lattitude to use natural light to good effect.

This shot I used just one of the speedlights to camera left. The reflection in his glasses is the tops of the buildings on either side of the alleyway, which acted in this instance almost like an extremely large strip-light!

Another doorway. This time I used a white umbrella to shoot through to soften the light on him.

Now we’re back to our harsh lighting. I lowered the shutter speed to kill as much of the ambient as I could and placed the bare strobe to far camera right. There was a set of bars that created some great shadows in the doorway that I really tried to capture.

And here’s a shot of Daniel playing in the doorway with the bars. I brought my second speedlight back in for this one and got that split-lighting setup going again. The one to camera-right however I shot through an umbrella to soften the light and act as more of a fill light.