For today’s Slanted Lens lighting lesson, we are back with cowboy extraordinaire Will Roberts. Our goal was to get a shot of Will spinning a 50 foot lasso on top of a plastic horse. This shoot had three obstacles to overcome:

1. Isolate the talent in the background
2. Overcome the lighting challenge from that background
3. Make room for the 50′ rope

The Solutions

Due to the power lines, only two directions would work for the background. The sun in the back would wash out the background, so I ending up using the sun as a key light to get a nice deep, blue background.

To make enough room for the rope, I had to aim more towards the house but this was too much house, so I split it so I’d have the house on one side and the fence on the other.

I just used a single Photoflex FlexFlash as a fill light to open up the shadows.

For the camera settings, I set the ISO at 100, shutter speed at 1/125, and aperture at f9.0. I am using a Tamron SP Lens 24-70 mm at about 35 mm.

Here are some final images:

The Recap

We needed to isolate the talent in the background, get nice light with that background, and find enough room for the rope. To overcome this, we used the sun as a key light with a FlexFlash as a fill light. We moved closer the house to fit the rope, but then aimed the camera more toward the fence to avoid having too much house in the background.

As always, keep those cameras roll’n and keep on click’n.