What Chuck Does

Lighting at the baby grand…

I spend a lot of time on the piano and I figured why not try a strobist shot with the baby grand. This was highly experimental and one of the few times I have used more than 1 strobe. This is actually the first time I’ve had this many Nikon CLS strobes to work with as well.

I started with the side angle 30 degree camera upper left with DIY beauty dish to produce the fill lighting:

Then I added a “into-my-face” hard rim light at camera left coming (behind the piano). The strobe was bare-bulb, no light modifier was used in order to create a harsher effect:

Lastly, I used a backlight camera front (to my right) as a rim light on my head/body. It was bare bulb too:

Finally I turned on all the strobes at the same time, made some slight positioning and other adjustments, and added a bit of post-processing:

Truth be told, the end product came out kind of bland with less of the contrast that I was hoping to create. I think I would have benefitted from less power on the beauty dish and more power on the 2 bare bulbed strobes. I’ll remember this for the next attempt!