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    Thursday 18 November 2010

    testing the DIY backdrop stand......

    18 November 2010
    Mohammadpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    after Eid day, it was turn for a continuation...... Lamisa provided me with the impetus in the morning.... she pulled me into my makeshift studio...... it was real delight actually.... it is always so difficult to keep her in front of the lens... and now it came from her!!..... she posed in front of the lens in a voluntary act and the whole shoot was done within minutes!!







    and then the night shoot was inspired by my wife..... Lamisa played a small part, but the most important thing was that she stayed out of the frame in most occasions, which was too important!!





    the set-up.....



    Eid day shoots were done using an improvised backdrop, which wasn't really suitable for portraits of a full-grown human..... Lamisa was probably the biggest subject in front of it..... I wanted to extend the shoots beyond these limited prospects..... I had a much bigger backdrop stand made of aluminium pipes that I had used previously, but not with a lotta success..... the stand was not stable enough.... but since acquiring the boom stands, I had the idea floating around in my head.... the booms came from the mike stands that I had acquired a while back.... the base of the mike stands provided an excellent set of studio equipment.... two of these base stands provided the base for the backdrop stands.... the backdrop stands had bases for themselves, but they needed weights to stand upright..... now the base stands gave the badly needed balance.... no weights required.... on the other hand, the cross-bar was another problem before..... attaching the cross-bar to the stands was something of a challenge previously..... now the system works much better with the use of "T"..... a couple of "T" attached the cross-bar perfectly on top of the stands.... the system was now more stable than any time....

    another problem was to cut the spill of light.... that was absolute necessity to work with a black background.... I don't have a big softbox and space is something of a premium..... using panels provide the big lights, but they do produce a lot of light-spill.... I had been using some black fabric as sort of a GoBo between the backdrop and the main diffuser...... that more-or-less did the job.... but today, I found another spill on the top-end of the backdrop.... this spill wasn't there previously as the backdrop wasn't that high.... I thus put another black fabric on the SB-900-diffuser combination and the the spill was gone.....

    another change was the power of the SB-600 hair-light.... I had overestimated the SB-600 and kept its power at one-stop higher than the other SB-900 hair-light.... it seems that the SB-600 needed much more power to feature in the shot.... so, whereas I used 1/128 power on the SB-900, I used 1/8 power on the SB-600.... both served the purpose of hair-light..... the above shots hardly had the effect of the SB-600.... for some later shots the SB-600 had the power increased and was featuring much more clearly in the shots.....

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