His Favorite Chair | A Corgi

[D-B-J]

"His Favorite Chair"

Bowen loves this chair--it's one of his favorite in the house. Today, while working on my website, he got up and laid down on it in such a way that made it hard to NOT photograph. So I quick setup my gear and snapped this photo of him relaxing.

Nikon D800
Nikon 85mm 1.8G
Nikon SB700 in 43" Umbrella Camera Left
Pocketwizards

His Favorite Chair by f_one_eight, on Flickr

Comments and critiques always welcome!

Cheers!
Jake

 

[Dagwood56]

Love it!

 

[xzyragon]

The umbrella highlight patch above the dog's head on the chair is a little distracting, along with the other highlights on the chair. I wonder if you could tone them down without affecting the dog's lighting. But it's still an awesome shot.

 

[Derrel]

I agree...that huge diffuse reflection of the light is working against the overall mood of the shot. I think this would have looked better with a ceiling bounced flash, or with a significantly different light placement, so that the reflection of the light source could be rendered much smaller and less prominent. As shot, the light's reflection on the leather is really intruding into the shot.

 

[D-B-J]

I'll rework it tomorrow and see what I come up with.

 

[tirediron]

A gridded SB might work well on this.

 

[D-B-J]

I think I liked the highlight because I liked how it brought out the character of the chair but I definitely see how it's a distraction.

 

[tirediron]

You definitely want to show the texture of the leather, BUT... you want to pretty much eliminate the strong, specular highlights.

 

[D-B-J]

You definitely want to show the texture of the leather, BUT... you want to pretty much eliminate the strong, specular highlights.

Maybe a gridded sb on his face and a light from above on the leather.

 

[Derrel]

Whatever it takes, just get the reflections under control. Incidence angle equals reflection angle. One of the things working against you is a slightly round-ish chair back, and a rounded light source...

Umbrellas don't allow easy reflection control on some types of subjects because they (umbrellas) have a rounded nature, where there are countless angles the light can emanate from. On a shoot- through umbrella (which this kinda' looks like to me) with a speedlight in it, there is often a VERY severely-curved illuminated area, where the flash lights the center of the bowl of the umbrella, and that area is very hot, then the periphery of the umbrella is much weaker. When a curved light source meets a subject that is reflective, and also curved, well...umbrella, meet chair back.

With a softbox, you have a single plane where the light comes from, which makes reflection control much easier. That is also why I mentioned ceiling bounce--it gives a pretty FLAT lighting point of origin. When your light source has just one, major plane of origination, it's easier to avoid big hot-spot type reflections on curved surfaces.

But no matter WHAT the light modifier is, it always comes down to what the camera lens "sees", and where the light is coming from in relation to the subject. When you are working alone, and have no modeling lights, you literally cannot see the final results until the shot has been taken. And working fast to set up and grab a shot is one thing, and that's what this shot is....this is not a 4-hour, paid gig, we know that...

An interesting exercise would be to convert this from color to black and white, and see how it looks with that reflection pattern.

 

[Derrel]

I just pulled it into Lightroom, and burned the reflection area down two stops...I looked at it in color, and then B&W...easily fixable because the leather is so smooth that the tone manipulation is almost invisible!!! Even with my substandard burning-in skills!