Creating a Sunset in the studio

The winter blues can get the best of anyone even here in Vancouver.

I have found that with all the work going on in the dark studios at school and coming home in the dark I’m getting a little depressed. Recently we were assigned a “made backgrounds” illustration assignment, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try and bring on the sun!

The goal for this photo was to create an image of this bronze horse in a paddock walking toward a bright warm sunset. So I set up the scene using a paper fence taped to the back of a frosted piece of Plexiglas. and set a Norman strobe low behind the Plexiglas with a CTO gel overlay. The background was looking ok. So I moved onto the foreground.

On the foreground I would have loved to get some sod or AstroTurf but I had to settle with a green backdrop that was kicking around the studio, I dribbled some pebbles around the horse in-order to make it look like stones in the paddock. To light the horse in the foreground I used a very low powered Norman strobe with a 1/2 CTB gel. Thinking back to it now I don’t really think that it needed the gel.

The biggest problem I ran into was the foreground light falling onto the background. To fix this I used a C-stand with a white piece of foam-core as a gobo to block the light falling on the Plexiglas. which helped to even out the exposure. The photo below shows what the set looked like. it did not take more than an hour to set up and shoot but that does not include all the pre-planning.

Here is an example of what the final image will look like once developed, keep in mind that the gobo on the background is not perfect and there is some dirt on the Plexiglas. This shoot was a lot of fun and it made me forget about the rainy cold weather outside for just a little while!