Mohammadpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh
it was an idea waiting to be implemented for quite some time..... my wife had been pushing me to take the initiative..... but my work pressure in recent times was not leaving me with a lot of energy at the end of the day.... so, I needed that big push to move my lazy butt....
my wife gave the main impetus.... she brought out all the toys of Lamisa despite knowing the fact that she is the one who would have to pack those up once again..... we had been looking for the day when Lamisa would start to understand the significance of toys.... up till now she was too young to understand this.... but this time, when she got all the toys in front of her, she got really excited and didn't really know what to do with all of that...... quite ironically, her interests took a nosedive quite quickly..... she became more interested in watching the outputs of my photography on the camera LCD...... and then, she became too interested in her newly-found passion, her toothbrush..... she wrestled it from her mum and started to chew on to it..... we put her amongst the toys once again, but this time, with her toothbrush......
the session was quite short, but we more-or-less got the results...... but still, waited for the time when Lamisa would go to sleep...... and there came another opportunity.... we created her own playhouse around her..... and she was too much in her dreamworld to be able to wake up to the bursts from my flashes....
now the geeky stuff..... I took a leaf from Joe McNally's book "The Moment it Clicks" and started with one light...... I didn't want harsh shadows on the background, which was really close to the subject..... so, I decided to set up light in an overhead position...... I used my recently made 4'x4' aluminium panel with white diffusion materials and put that on top of two improvised booms.... the panel was illuminated with one SB-900 running at 1/8th power.... this gave an overhead illumination...... I made the stage with white cloth on the bed..... it lessened distraction and also, added to the exposure and helped remove shadows.... I expected quite a bit o shadows because of this one light..... I used a small reflector on camera right to fill the shadows.... it didn't prove to be enough because of the distance and size of reflector.... I then switched to another SB-900 on camera right, shooting through a white shoot-through umbrella.... 1/32nd power was enough to fill in all the shadows and create sort of a high-key light..... the white walls on the background and on the right also added to the exposure.... I used a relatively larger aperture (f5) which helped to shoot with much lower power on the flashes..... the lower power on the flashes helped to recycle quicker and I was able to capture more moments and more frames....
for the last shot of Lamisa sleeping, I used one SB-900 on camera in TTL mode, bounced from the white ceiling.... used f2.8 to create a shallow DoF for a more dreamy feel.....
this was the set-up.......
