After planning my personal project and gathering the necessary supplies and assistants and scouting a location, we converged on Lake Thunderbird near Norman, Oklahoma on Thursday evening. It was HOT – about 104 where we were at and even hotter in some locations around Oklahoma. I had two volunteers/friends there to help with setting up equipment. First we set up “camp” with a tent, sleeping bag, and all the peripheral accessories. I scoped out my planned shots in advance, since I knew once the sun started sinking behind the horizon we would have to move fast to get multiple setups completed.
Aime Taylor, my model for the evening, showed up right on time with her husband and a couple of bags full of clothes. We went through the wardrobe and I picked out some attire that I thought would fit our theme. I wanted the shot to be very realistic yet cute and sexy. It was to be a fantasy shot for adventure riders – someone they would dream about meeting at a campsite.
My original plan was to use my AB800 lights for the shoot – not because I needed the light output, but because of the great light modifiers I have for the AB’s. But alas, somehow the AB-800’s missed the loadout so we fell back to shooting with Nikon SB-900’s. Plenty of power out of those babies, since we were shooting after sunset, but we had to do a bit of finagling to control the light the way I wanted – on the subject and not on the ground in front. I wanted to boost the sunset colors on my models face, so gelled one SB-900 with a full CTO gel and bounced that into a silver umbrella. The second SB-900 was used simply for fill, shot through a Lumiquest softbox. We shot various configurations with just these two lights. VERY happy with the results.
First set was Aime camping, hanging around the tent cooking dinner.
Next we had her in the water cooling off – of course!
Finally a shot of her getting ready for bed in the tent.
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