Living the dream

Today's assignment was to photograph a guy who gave up his 9-to-5 office job with benefits to play video games full-time. I thought I would have some fun with lighting, since I had plenty of time. I wanted to use lighting to immitate the glow of a television screen, and I wanted to include as many other visual elements of the gaming culture as I could.

For the lighting I put a shoot-thru umbrella directly in front of, and below the subjects face. Above the umbrella I place a silver reflector to fill in the top of the subjects face to prevent him from looking like he was telling ghost stories in front of a campfire. I also put a CTO gel over the strobe in the umbrella and set the camera's white balance to tungsten/incandencent, which made the daylight sneaking in through the blinds behind him look very blue. I had the subject put on one of the video games in the background and say, "Cheese!"

Here is a photo of the lighting set-up:

You can see the umbrella in the bottom right corner of the photo and the silver bounce above it.