John W Jacobsen Photography

My wife is a marketing guru and has been after me for some time to create some stock photography for her. Today was snowy and kind of blech so I set up a mini-light studio in our dining room and went to work.

First, I hung a crisp white sheet on the wall with some gaffer tape and set up my EZ Boxes with SB-600′s in them. I decided to use my Jr Poppers over the built-in Nikon CLS – my only justification was that I could. The two softboxes were set up on either side of the subject – one camera left and one camera right. The camera left flash was set to 1/4 power and the camera right was set to 1/2 power. Then, it was just a matter of dialing in my exposure to get these images – most of them were in the 1/125s and f/8 range (give or take a stop) and firing away. The lens I chose for these shots was my Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 Micro – it’s wicked sharp and always produces great images for me.

Sure, I could have gone with available light and tweaked the exposure compensation to get a pretty decent shot, but I wanted to use the lights to “nuke” the sheet. No matter how much ironing we did, there were still plenty of wrinkles. By throwing a lot of light at the sheet, I was able to accomplish two things. 1) The background looks pretty close to pure white and 2) you don’t see any wrinkles!

The only negative to the shots was I really wanted to get a set up shot of this but of course, I forgot about that until after I had already torn everything down. C’est la vie. Here are some more shots from this afternoon:

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1. Snow got you down?