Shooting Harry Lee

"Harry Lee"

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of photographing Harry Lee, a local and well known personality, who until last February was the host of a daily morning radio show on a local radio station.  Harry is an immensely popular character in Dundalk and a very jovial man.  This is the first of many (I hope) photo opportunities for me to photograph local "A Listers".

This was a pretty simply shot to set up.  A Black seamless for the background and three flash units.  The main light (canon 580ex ii) was positioned in a shoot thru' umbrella, whose left side was half masked (think Phantom of the Opera), using its own black removeable cover. Positioning of this was easy enough, but a little care was needed to avoid spill onto the background, while allowing the right side light Harry's face.  Another flash unit (Nikon SB-24's) was positioned, right and behind, to create some separation and to create rim lighting on the back edge of the chair, the hair and shirt.  This unit was gelled with a CTB and snooted with a 4" snoot and grid to help control the spill and direction.  I added a third flash, ungelled, but snooted to camera right, specifically to highlight the microphone and headphone props.  Each flash was set to manual and triggered with Seculine Twinlink radio receivers, from a hotshoe mounted Transmitter.

Getting the light ratios and balance was fairly easy too.  I maxed out the Sync Speed to 1/250th sec, helping kill the Ambient light.  Using the SB-24's set to 1/16th, I stopped down the Aperture to f/5.6 'till I was satisfied with those and then introduced the main strobe dialling its power to 1/8th power until the mix looked right on the LCD.  All that was left then was to get Harry to stop smiling ...