Hicks-Wright.net

I've recently started trying to participate in Strobist Bootcamp 2008. Strobist Bootcamp is a great set of practice exercises set up by Strobist, a.k.a. David Hobby. He hands out assignments as a photo editor for a magazine or newspaper would, with some lighting lessons to help you out. You do the assignment, submit it to Flickr with a couple of tags, and get comments and critique from other participants. The first Bootcamp was run a couple of years ago, but some Strobist followers periodically revive it.

I missed the first two assignments, so I really wanted to get in on this one. The idea of this assignment was to use light to make someone look smart. Being that my favorite model happens to be extremely smart, I though she'd be the perfect subject. Originally, I was thinking of puting her in front of a couple of server racks, maybe get a screen reflecting off her glasses, something like that. But when I scouted out the area by the servers here at work, I couldn't come up with any good angles. I thought about it some more, and decided it would work better to shoot through the window in my office and back into Ben's office. I figured I could bounce a couple flashes off our pretty blue walls to get a nice cool "ambient" glow, and then use the screen, or more likely, a flash hidden behind th screen, to light her face.

Though it sounded like a promising setup, it lacked something in creativity, considering one of David's most famous (and most copied) was exactly the same idea. As I was falling asleep, thinking about it, I had an idea: cheesy hacker movies. It's a law that all cheesy hacker movies must have the screen projected back on the hacker's face. Of course, this doesn't work in real life because a screen is not a focused light source, and just ends up looking like a blob of light. But a couple weeks earlier, I'd seen an example of a photo that projected a $100 bill onto an egg (nest egg). I realized I could do the same with a flash, a lens and a "cookie", or something in the shape of text. I printed out some terminal output, stuck it in front of a flash, put a lens in front of that, bingo! It projected the text on the wall perfectly! I had my shot.

See the shots below for the full setup.