The subject: The Koh family.
The client: Prestige Magazine Singapore.
The brief: The Koh family are the founders of Heng Long International, a public listed crocodile leather tannery. The shoot is to be done at the tannery and shall also feature the crocodile leathers.
The shoot: The tannery is huge and spanned across several buildings. The room used for the shoot was very well lit by fluorescent room lights and there’s some tungsten spotlights high up overhead the hanging leathers which cast some orange hotspots on the white wall. For a group portrait I would want to use flash; which means I need to manage three different light temperatures here; ‘white’ of the flash, orange of the spotlights and green of the room lights. I was considering to gel my flash a quarter CTG/Window Green to correct for the room ambient but I suspect since the tannery workers are working with colors, the fluorescent room lights are probably the better daylight balanced ones. Anyway their color looks really clean, so I decided to go without the gels. The orange spotlights probably weren’t a problem because they were rather weak from the high position and I would be cropping out the orange hotspots cast on white wall anyway.
The question was do I have enough flash power and more importantly the light quality, to do a flash dominant exposure? I had on site two 40″ umbrellas; one being a shoot through and the other an umbrella box, both powered by SB800s. I stacked them together high up side by side to increase relative size and positioned them as close to the subjects and leathers as I could without causing unevenness from flash falloff. I need at least f/5.6 for enough depth and details on both the people and the leathers. I also need to shoot fast for group portraits situations to get more shots in for a higher keeper rate so would like to keep the SB800s at 1/4 power the max for the the recycle speed. All things considered I definitely needed to burn in the ambient light and and shutter speed was down to 1/60 for the drag. The fluorescent room lights held up quite well, though its green is still there if you look for it – shadow side of subjects’ faces, but forgiving enough.
We had an interesting guided tour around the tannery after the shoot!
Strobist and exposure info:
SB800 with 40” shoot-through umbrella, camera left, at 1/4 power.
SB800 with 40″ umbrella-box, camera left, at 1/4 power.
1/60 sec at f/5.6, ISO 400, 48mm focal length (FX)
Here are the tear sheet scans.
PS: The fake Photoshop flare was not added by me. No.
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