Little Adventures: Concept Driven Lighting 3: Let the Sunshine In

I will admit upfront that I'm borrowing this lighting concept from the notebook of American corporate photographer David Tejada. He lights a scene in ways that doesn't look artificially lit. They come out naturally realistic and believable. Recreating the warm glow of sunset in a fairly shaded scene is one of those that stuck to my head and have been using in a few of my previous photoshoots.

Once again, with a grilles pattern and a tall window, I thought of employing this techniqued one more time. We used only 1 light for this series of shots - a speedlite on a stick (light stand) with 1/2 CTO gel to simulate the orange glow of the setting sun. A full CTO would have been too warm. (See light setup shot below.)

So I placed that setup outside and closed the door to minimize, if not totally eliminate, ambient light coming from outside. We also had a small white reflector, to "gently" bounce some of that flash light back into the shadows. I normally use my EOS 7D's built-in flash trigger but since it's IR-based, it would be useless in this setup with the door close and no way for it to have direct line-of-sight with the Speedlite outside. This is a job for Pocket Wizard.

The rest are just matters of choreographing the angle and height of the speedlite with the models pose and position to either avoid or creatively use shadows coming from the grilles pattern and falling on her face.