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.
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