Where's An Assistant When You Need One?

I was on a location shoot last week at a house in the hills between Malibu, California, and the Conejo Valley. (Oh yeah. I already said that in my last post.) As I already mentioned, the house was pretty cool: Very upscale, big, and bodacious. In the property's backyard, there's a pool, an infinity pool to be more specific, and my clients wanted me to shoot one of the pretty girls out there with the view of the valley behind her.

It was not to be a girl-in-the-water pic, which would've been cool considering it was an infinity pool, as she had just come out of hair and makeup and they didn't want that messed up since she'd be going in front of the video cameras the moment I finished.

No problem.

Except the sun was in a really bad place: It was mid-day and, while this time of year El Sol is still traversing fairly low-ish in the sky, it would be directly behind me and shining brightly in the model's face. I needed to diffuse that sunlight. I didn't want her squinting and I didn't want a lot of harsh shadows.

Fortunately, this particular production had a full lighting crew. Although I didn't have carte blanche to use them and their gear, I figured I could ask for a favor. So, I did.

"Hey guys," I asked. "You have a silk on that truck?"

They did. They had a 10' x 12' polyester silk on the truck. (Hmmm... polyester silk: an oxymoron of sorts?) Better yet, they were willing to rig it on a frame and get it up on stands. This was good news as the silk knocks the exposure down about a stop-and-a-half and I'd still be setting a strobe in front of the silk--between the model and silk, that is--to help pop her from the background. Balancing the ambient (in the background) with the exposure for the model was gonna be easy. I would have liked to have darkened the sky a bit, but with the sun directly behind me, a polarizing filter wasn't going to be much help. I have a 4" x 4" (graduated) ND filter which, in these situations, I sometimes hold (strategically) in front of my lens for effect, but I didn't have it with me. Oh well.

The wind was calm so everyone agreed the silk could be set without much danger of it being blown over.

The lighting crew made fairly fast work of assembling the frame and setting the silk. I set a monolight to a stand, between the model and the silk, and modified the strobe with a scrim. So the monolight would be my key, or main light, and that big, polyester, silk, diffusing the sun, would be soft fill.

So far so good.

But as I clicked a couple snaps, I noticed the image was kind of flat. I needed something coming in from behind the model. This is the part where this post's title comes into play-- Ya see, the PM (production manager) was now making noise about the photo set taking too long--assembling and setting the silk apparently cut into my time with the model--and the crew was on a break. Dammit! All I needed was an assistant to hold a reflector and bounce in some hard light from behind! Unfortunately, since the freaking crew was on a break and the production manager was getting impatient I resigned myself to the images being captured without highlighting from behind the model which, IMO, made the photos suffer.

Another case of time, or lack of it, trumping art. Oh. I should also mention that, about two-thirds of the way through snapping the pictures, the crew came off their break. Keeping my eye out for the impatient PM, I was going to ask if one of them could grab a reflector and bounce in some highlights when, all at once, the wind came up and filled the silk like a sail on a ship and, in spite of the fact there was over a hundred pounds of sand bags on each stand, knocked it over.

And that was that.

The pretty-girl-sans-back-lighting is Sunset... photographed at mid-day.

Okay. We're taking off for a weekend of tent-trailer camping. We'll be on the beach again, this time a bit North of Malibu. It's supposed to warm up this so it should be better weather than we had at Carpenteria State Beach a few weeks ago.