Sheet Magic

I've been wanting to get a soft box for a little bit now. I do just fine with the 3 brollies that I have, but of course you always want to diversify, and it would be nice to have at least one in your repertoire. Unfortunately its number three on my list. The wonderful thing I've seen about soft boxes (other than the price) is that it gives you a nice controlled and soft light that just gently washes over the subject like a gentle breeze.

In lieu of that, I used the next best thing: a sheet. Using my hallway, I hung up a sheet to the left of the models, and placed the strobe behind it. Now granted, I was just shooting with some captive friends and probably would not do this on a paying shoot, but it gave me an idea of what I could expect.


One of the things I learned from the incredible Strobist site is the larger the light source and the closer it is to the subject, the softer it is. I unfortunately didn't think to take a photo of the setup, but the subjects were at average about 2-3 feet from the light source, at a 45" angle. The strobe was placed slight above eye level and set at about 1/8th power.

In Lightroom, I brought the color temperature down from 5900 to 4900 to give a cooler, early morning window light feel, and a few other minor retouches (adjusting exposure, lowering saturation) as well as applying a few custom filters. Hard to resist the urge to over process and leave them as they were, but the models actually insisted on it, so the decision was kind of made for me.