Assignment – Beauty Salon (dec.2009)
One day I get a call from a friend asking me if I was available for a 3h shooting at a beauty salon. I said yes, even though I had no idea of the conditions I was walking in on.
We set up a meeting to find out more about the project and meet the model, but the main thing for me was "what type of light will there be available?". Once there I noticed the tight space I had to work in and the fluorescent tubes overhead (there was enough window light to get some nice shots for some sort of beauty contest but it was not the case here)
- I had to take 1-2 good pictures of every service the salon had to offer.
- To do that I had to rearrange the furniture a bit. (I hope Monica, the owner, wasn`t too upset about that. They offer almost every imaginable service and it`s not their fault the gear takes so much space).
- I had to refrain from using wides or ultra-wides. I managed to get most of the shots using a 50mm lens @ f/1.4-2.8.
- The tricky part was to get the green light of the fluorescent lamps to be white again. That you can do in two ways:
- you either get some really large sheets of green gel and cover all the lights in that particular space, or:
- you gel your lights (in this case 3 x Nikon SB800) with half-cut green gels and switch you camera`s WB to fluorescent.
- The lighting solution for this was 1x SB-800 in a large umbrella on a stand as the main light, and 2x SB-800 left and right nuking the walls and ceiling @ half-power (creating some sort of a product photography tent from the inside). These were fired remotely with one SB-900 on the camera. I wish I had 2 more lights for some accents but for this one, it`s good enough.
The picked 25-30 pictures will go on the salon`s future (face-lifted) website. (the one active right now is @ this address)
Iulia was wonderful to work with, and although it was early in the morning for both of us we managed to be in sync for the whole session. We were out of there in just under 3 hours.
