Improvising when shooting without a light stand

[pixel pete]

Greetings Colin,
I've been away from C-I-C. Just popping in and I came across the School of Portraiture. Excellent advice and extremely generous of you to share your time and experience. I wanted to share this image I took recently. There wasn't a lot of fancy equipment involved. One Speedlite off-camera, gelled 1/4 color temperature orange and a Lumiquest softbox. There's more details on my blog about how I shot this portrait without a light stand by improvising.

[JR1]

Hmmmm

Lovely model, love the coloured background to an extent, the highlights to me are distracting and the top left corner bright highlight and what looks like a bit missing from the left distracts, and what a shame that such a lovely model choses to have a ring through her nose like a bull

[saea501]

I think Jeremy summed it perfectly. Her left eye looks a little bit soft as well.

I never understood the hardware in the face thing either. I see absolutely gorgeous girls with rings and pins stuck through their skin.

I guess I'm just old school.

[pixel pete]

Hello Bob,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Do me a favor and click on the picture to bring up a bigger version. See if the left eye still looks soft.

[saea501]

Hey Peter,

I did and it does. In fact the end of her nose looks soft as well. It looks as if your focus point was her hair just above her right eye. And with what appears to be a very shallow DOF it's quite easy to soften some important features.

It's still a pretty shot.

[Manfred M]

Peter – I had a quick peek at your blog and had a chuckle when I saw your “light stand”. Why not? It seems to have done the job for you. I’ll have to keep the technique in mind should I find myself in a similar gear / shooting situation.

That being said, even when magnified, I do find the image to be a touch soft. It looks to me that the camera was in motion and you dragged the shutter during the shot. There was enough ambient light to give a bit of motion blur that resulted in a slight softening of the image when in pixel peeping mode. I suspect this is the cause, rather than missed focus.

Regardless, it’s a very nice image.

[pixel pete]

Thanks Grumpy Diver and Bob,
It appears I am human after all. I'm looking at the original DNG I have on my MacBook Pro with the Retina screen and it looks tack sharp, so it must be lost in translation from that to JPG. I appreciate both your input.