For my location lighting class, my class got a permit to shoot at Ruby Skye, a club in downtown San Francisco. I was originally supposed to shoot another model however, en route to a jewelry pickup, the model’s boyfriend got caught in a car accident and so the model couldn’t shoot with us anymore. Good thing one of our classmate’s offered a friend of her’s to model for us so we ended up shooting her. We were under a time crunch because our new model had to leave soon for lunch.

I really love the light on the model’s face, it’s just that her hand is gigantic in comparison to her head. My instructor called it “monster hand.” (´∩`。) He suggested cropping the hand out but I like the wide shot. But for my portfolio, I’ll get that fixed. Aside from that, I like how I was able to balance the ambient red light with the strobe and speedlite. I dropped my shutter speed down to 1/8 second since the couch area was very dim. I had to bring out my flashlight to set up equipment. I also like how her lips stand out!
One of the things I did in editing was retouched and smoothened the skin, blurred the wrinkles on her shirt, brought down the highlight on her forehead, added color tones and cropped in on the right just a little bit because the distortion was making her thighs look bigger. You can see the original photo below.

And the set up shot! I always like seeing and showing behind-the-scenes shots.
We used a Profoto 7B pack which was too powerful even on the lowest settings since we were almost shooting in the darkness. The softbox was also too big so we flagged down half of it so it wouldn’t spread too much. I shot my photo much closer in, not including the wall, or else that would’ve been too distracting if I included it in.
Throughout the shoot, the crew of Ruby Skye were starting to prepare for that night’s event and one of them brought their small poodle who kept running around. The poodle was so cute! I told my friend, before we leave, I’m going to kidnap the dog while the owner was busy working. It would’ve been great if I did. I also wish I had a clearer picture of the dog but he kept moving so much.
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