Manufacturing a sunny day

As you saw from yesterday's blog, it was raining heavily at my studio. One photo we had planned was of a model with out-stretched arms against a clear sky. Since we didn't have the sky, we photographed the model in the studio against a white background and put the sky in later. This actually worked out better because I was able to harmonize the color of the sky with the color of what the model was wearing, and also control compositional placement of the clouds. Gotta love digital photography!

The model was lit from the area she is facing with a single, very large umbrella. A second light from the left rear lit her hair. The camera was a Nikon D600 with 70-200mm lens. When putting together photos like this it is important to match the lighting to the background scene. The 6' softened umbrella gave a good approximation of daylight, while the smaller hair light was set to a lower exposure, just enough to add some punch to the hair but not so much as to indicate another light source.