Editorial Portraits 3

© Tom Parkes

A thoughtful portrait, intended to be used across two pages with room for a designer to drop copy to the left of the subject. With a picture designed to be used in this way it's important that nothing important sits in the centre or "gutter" of the pages where it would be lost. There's also room for text to be placed to the right or below the subject. To light this picture I placed an SB-700 in a small softbox clamped overhead, manual control at 1/2 power, raking the subject's face with light from above and giving me f8 at ISO 200. As expected, this left the eyes in deep shadow and so I added a second SB-700 fitted with a grid at eye level to provide some fill. This flash was set to TTL and powered right down to -3 stops. Why TTL and not manual? I wanted the tiniest pop of flash and I've found that a setting of TTL -3 can produce a lower output than manual power at the lowest 1/128th setting. The shutter speed was 1/125 sec and this coupled with the aperture of f8 effectively kills the ambient light and gives me control. The only light in this picture now is added by me.