The sun is a wonderful light source — especially in the early morning or late afternoon. But if the sun is coming in from the side, you get some pretty dark shadows on the opposite side.

Inspired by the images of Brent Williamson I decided to try a bit of crosslighting this afternoon.

With the beautiful warm late afternoon sun to work with shining onto the subject from the right, I setup a 580EX off to the left about 15 feet away at 1/32 power. Triggered using pocket wizards, the direct flash put just enough light into the dark shadow areas for a pleasing photograph. The idea is to use the flash in a very subtle way as to not even look like flash was used.

This is a very simple setup. If you don’t have pocket wizards, an off-camera sync cord will work just as well.

A client out-of-state needed a photograph of an oil painting of Captain John Webster, which is hanging in the Harford County courthouse, for an article he is writing.

Sounds simple, right? Yes, and No.

The simple part is that your subject is very good at standing very still — for as long as you need (duh, it’s hanging on the wall)

The difficult part is lighting the oil painting without causing hotspots, reflections, etc. Other factors are that the portrait is hanging about seven feet off the ground in a dark paneled hallway with a 18-20 foot ceiling. The courthouse has a very large number of portraits hanging throughout, and I’m not sure if it is because most of these paintings are so old, or if they were originally painted this way, or if the lighting inside the building isn’t optimal for these portraits, but they are appear very dark from the naked eye. I was initially a bit concerned.

I brought my 13 foot lightstands, not knowing before I arrived exactly where and how high this portrait was hanging in the courthouse. I lit the painting with two 580EXs bounced into white umbrellas placed approximately 30 degrees to each side about 5-6 feel away. The strobes where fired wireless with Pocket Wizards.

Another challenge was getting myself high enough to shoot the portrait straight on. I’m sure it was quite a sight to see me standing on 2 reams of paper, which were on top of a step ladder (please don’t attempt this at home). I must have been slightly entertaining for I had my share of on-lookers during all of this.

I was very pleased with the results from my first effort at photographing an oil painting. The lighting I applied really brought out more detail than you can see in when viewing the painting in person. If/when I do this again, I think I will put the lights in a much lower angle, such as 10 degrees with the umbrellas almost shooting back at each other.

I really enjoyed the company of all of the folks I interacted with at the courthouse. Everyone was extremely pleasant and had a great sense of humor.

I shot a basketball on my pergo floor in my basement. Overhead I used a Canon 580EX flash at 1/8 power with shipping tube over flash head to create the spotlight look. I positioned a second 580EX at 1/32 power on floor with snoot pointed directly at ball to give a bit of fill to the lower half of ball.

I was quite pleased with the way this turned out. By looking at the image itself, you would think it was taken on a basketball court floor, rather than in my basement.

Below shows how the shot was setup:

My son was playing on the floor the other day and I was noticing his beautiful blue eyes. I grabbed my camera and took a nice closeup of him.

I processed the image using Nicole V’s actions and was extremely pleased with the outcome.