I had an idea for this picture and this isn't it. You see, I ran out of time. Gee, does that ever happen to photographers?!? Naaaahhhh! ;-)
In my minds-eye I pictured the red light on the background, hard side lighting coming from slightly behind the children, and an underexposed fill light to open up the shadows. I barely got the background and side lighting set up when I heard grandparents starting to say their 'good-byes' - I knew I was out of time.
The biggest problem I still had to solve was adding the fill light for the children which had to be completely blocked from contaminating the red light on the background (the red would have turned pink if contaminated by white light). I knew the exercise of blocking the fill light was going to take some creative thinking and unfortunately I now no longer had the luxury of time.
The result? No fill light. But I couldn't use the edge lights where they were because since they were behind the children there was only an edge light on them and no frontal detail. So my lightning fast solution was simply to pull the edge lights from behind to in front of the kids and cross-light them. This gave me enough light to reveal their faces but at the expense of very hard shadows.
Oh well - time was not on my side and even though my solution was less than perfect, I was still able to get a shot I could use (albeit not exactly what I had in mind). You gotta be able to think on your feet and change directions pretty quickly as a photographer - the world won't hold still for you, that's for sure.
To see more of my work visit my
commercial photography website.
I've been toying a lot lately with the idea of whether or not to include photographs I take with my phone into my stream of blog posts. Consider this one an experiment.
Chihuly: The Nature of Glass is the traveling art installation of Dale Chihuly that is currently nearing the end of its term here in Phoenix at the Desert Botanical Garden.
So, riding high on the self-portrait post from last night [interpretation: no better photos to post] I decided to put up one more. 
It has been quite a long time since I've been up to my old antics of being the last one awake at night playing with my photo gear.
On the last day of our camping trip at Coyote Buttes, we visited White Pocket (pictured immediately above). As with this entire area, White Pocket was unique and amazing.
If you ever have the opportunity to visit the desert Southwest, specifically areas near the Arizona/Utah border, take it! What an amazing place! This area is a natural wonder in every way.
I enjoy photographing interiors. They weren't something I planned for - more just sort of accidentally stepped into shooting them. For you Strobist readers you may remember a post about Scott Hargis - well that one stuck out in my mind because of the similarity to the work I had been doing with interiors (like the one above). 
