Here’s another post for the photographers out there. If you are a bride or just want to see wedding imagery, check out my portfolio for all the bridal and wedding goodness. My blog will be back to it’s regular programming shortly…

So here’s the cover we shot for the Occasions Magazine Fall 2001 Issue, shot at Foxhall Resort & Sporting Club with Bold American providing florals and decor. There’s more design goodness inside the magazine but we can only show the cover for now…

Looks simple huh?

So this where we started…

There were two big problems with Plan A: the SCREAMING late afternoon sunlight streaming in from the right side; and the general busy-ness of the background.

Solution to problem #1

I call it the wall of light. If you have lights already it costs you next to nothing: it’s just a big white sheet. It does two things… first, it serves as a huge scrim to block the sun (plus, it saves my assistants arms) and second, it becomes a 9 foot softbox when you light it from the other side, i.e. a wall of light. The reason I like the wall of light is because it preserves contrast in the scene (provided your wall of light is bright enough compared to whatever is on the other side) while leaving almost no shadows. In other words, it doesn’t look like you lit it at all. And that is pretty much always my goal.

So here it is: two Alien Bee 400s at roughly 1/4 power each, both firing off a Vagabond Mini Lithium battery, and a big white sheet I stole out of the laundry room at home. Impressive huh?

You’ve seen the wall of light before, here…

…and here…

…and a few other places I’m sure.

Solution to problem #2

So while I was setting up the wall of light, Heather was busy find a new vantage point with a better background, and here it is. What do you notice about these two images below?

The only difference between the two images above is the focal point: the left image is focused on the foreground plate/flower and the right image is focused on the chair. Look at the background. See how big a difference 3 feet can make on the overall “look” of the background?

I’m shooting at f/5 because I know that even at f/16 or f/22 I probably can’t get the entire table in focus (plus, shooting that stopped down will change the entire character of the image in a lot of ways) and at f/2 or f/2.8 my depth of field is so razor thin that it would be a pain to work with in post… so f/5 is a nice compromise.

30 or 40 images later we had the table decor exactly how we wanted it. So I got my tripod set up and took 5 images, each focusing on different elements of the table: the front of the foreground plate, the back of the foreground plate, the wine glass and flowers, the background plate, and the chair. Here they are laid out in Photoshop.

Here’s a little fun fact. Somewhere in the shuffle somebody moved the forks and forgot to put them back. Luckily, I had an earlier image of the forks and I managed to insert them. That is the only difference between the image above and the one below.

Here are images 2, 3, 4 and 5 with the background removed so you can see the pieces I took from each image.

And here’s the final image with a few touchups to the table cloth.

Whew!