Forest Shoot

I admit I was a little worried when at 130 p.m. I parked the truck at the Elk Lake Park.   We were running about a hour late on a day forecasted to rain in the afternoon.   In fact, it was already raining and I can tell you that I need to replace my wipers.  As we walked up the trail to the first spot, I was a little relieved to to find that the tree canopy was preventing much of the failing rain from hitting us down on the ground.   Hopefully this holds for an hour or two.

A few weeks ago, Jan van Vianen sent me an image that he really liked and wanted to have something similar for his portfolio.  It was a shot in a forest with a man holding up an end of a toga wrapped around him looking mysterious and a little sinister with darkened eye make up.  Hey, I can do that!

So I resolved to get that shot in the can first and if the weather held and Jan was not in the throws of hypothermia, we would get to another set up I had in mind: something classical but with an impish edge, i.e. Bacchus, Dionysus, Jim Morrission, Mark Morris.

So back to the vehicles to get gear and get Jan through make up.  Merilee Garret did the makeup for this shoot.  She was awesome to work, coming in all the way from Sooke on short notice to work with us.   BTW, the reflector work on this shoot was done by her too.


The first spot was between two large trees that I could use to frame Jan.   My initial set up was a 60" Soft-lighter as the main light and hard rim light from a behind.  Both lights were White Lighting X1600 powered by a home made battery pack that consists of  4 - 12V 5amp  rechargeable batteries daisy chained to a 350W Pure Sine Wave inverter; all tucked neatly into a plastic 20" tool box.  It seemed like a good way to start the shoot but something just was not grooving with me.  We swapped out the Soft-lighter and used a beauty dish.  The smaller and somewhat harder light of the dish was what I was looking for!

With the weather holding and Jan still in good spirits, we quickly set up a second location.  When scouting the area, I noticed a moss covered rock formation with large ferns that looked interesting.   I positioned the beauty dish just out of frame on the right and Merrilee is just off frame on left with the reflector.   So here is my take on something classical with an impish edge! 

The next one definitely possesses more edge than imp.

We shot another 10 minutes or so playing around with poses and such.  After which, I thought we were  pressing our luck with the weather and it was time to wrap.  We quickly struck the gear and headed back to the truck. As we cleared the shelter of the forest canopy, the rain arrived in earnest!  Sometimes you just get lucky.