Ken Shung's Lighting for the Magazine Class -- #3 -- Octabank Light

Model: Laura Volapacchio

For our third class, we had our choice of setting up with a Octabank, Softbox or Foamcore... I decided to go with the Octabank since we were doing portraits and I wanted a soft feel ... And after 15 minutes of shooting, this is what I ended up with ... :D

Background: Laura Volapacchio is currently attending NYU Gallatin, pursuing her own major focusing on Visual Culture (which is all encompassing fashion, dance, art and beauty). She is quite a sensible young lady and I wanted to portray her as such. Additionally, she loves to dance and has a background in ballet, but would love to do jazz or modern tap dance -- so my thought was to capture two types of portraits -- a young, sensible and fashionable young adult and a dancer with her ballet shoes on.

Lesson of the Day: Don't be afraid to move your lights around. Sometimes the model can be 2 ft away from the light -- and its ok... Just play with it, test it and see if it is what you want your photo to be... and of course, always be creative!

sidenote: for those who don't know what a octabank is (because I didn't), its essentially an octagon shaped soft box. there are two brands that make it (that i know of) -- elinchrom and westcott -- and its great for portraits. its a great bank light to evenly distribute light (or so, that's what I found). The bank light is also put on a redwing studio boom stand, which allows you to swivel the octabank everywhere (above the head, to the left to the right, below)...

I wonder though --- if you can achieve the same evenly dispersed light via umbrellas? ... probably similar, but not exactly the same -- Ken mentioned that the Octabank manages highlights better in clothing, where other smaller light sources have fall off within a foot.