Chairs and a DIY Boom
As Joel mentioned a few weeks ago, we're currently in the process of moving to a new office. As our influx of interns for the summer filled the current office past its capacity, I and the rest of the Copilot
team moved down to a temporary space in the new building. For the summer, we've been like our own little start up, complete with Nerf weapons (more to come on that), cardboard cutouts of T-Rex and Darth Vader, and cowboy posters.
The one difference is that we are also acting as a warehouse for some of the new furniture. We have stacks and stacks of chairs, an empty minifridge, two shipping palettes worth of desks, and a family of bookshelves, all in various states of unpacking.
Having all this designer furniture around, I just had to make a photo of it. I especially loved these chairs, their bright colors and complex legs. So after work, I walked around the office, chair in hand, until I found a suitible studio: our two glass Ikea lunch tables, set end-to-end. I wanted the lighting to be simple, one big, soft light directly overhead and one on the background for separation, much like the Platon's Putin shot (minus the decidedly evil looking subject).
The only problem was, I didn't have a way to get the light directly overhead. I could get it close, but I could see in the pictures that it was still coming from an angle. I needed a boom. But I do not own a boom; all I had with me was two lightweight light stands, two umbrellas, a clamp, two ball bungies, and some gaffer's tape. I quickly checked the MacGyver handbook, but it seems he'd never run into this problem. I'd have to do it on my own.
I first put the clamp on the top of one of the stands (we'll call it the "stand"), making sure the stud was as far into the clamp as possible, to make sure it couldn't rotate and fall off. If you look closely, you can see it's well past the hinge point.
Next, I lay the light stand with the umbrella (we'll call it the "boom arm") across the back end of the clamp, using one of the knobs to make sure it didn't slip backwards. At this point, the top side of the "boom arm" was much heavier than the bottom, and wanted to fall over. To fix this, I used two ball bungies, one end on a leg of the "boom arm", and the other on a knob on the "stand" to provide tension.
Another important thing to note, especially since the photos don't show it well: the legs on the "stand" are nearly flat to the ground, so they're nice and wide. Additionally, I made sure to keep one of the legs pointed in the same direction as the "boom arm" at all times. This kept it from falling over, since at no point was this rig balanced correctly.
In the final setup shot, you can see how everything was positioned: On the boom arm is a shoot-through umbrella with an SB-800 on 1/8 power, positioned directly over the chair. In the bottom right is the background light, a Vivitar 285HV with a gridspot on 1/16. Camera was at 1/160 at f/8.0 with ISO 200 to kill the ambient.
In post, I just cleaned up smudges on the table and removed the seam between the two tables, as it was distracting. To make the triptych, I just resized the images slightly (I wasn't using a tripod, so there were some slight differences) so they all matched up.
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