flex

I've lost a few pounds since the beginning of the year and I'm becoming a bit more comfortable on the other side of the camera.  Since I love creating edgy sports portraits and don't currently have a lot of models at my disposal, I decided to give a self-portrait a try.  For this type of shot, I usually go to a beauty dish as the main light.  This instance was no different.  The beauty dish provides punch and contrast in the lighting.  I used a grid on the beauty dish to help minimize the spilling of light onto the floor and background.  In this case, the background/floor was white paper.  White paper is pretty reflective as you can see from the photo.  I placed the beauty dish slightly above my head, angled down.  The closeness of the dish provides for decent lighting on my face and upper body while also providing a pretty good fall off from light to shadow below my waist.  To camera left, I used a gridded strip box to provide the accent lighting on the right side of my face, forearm, abdomen, and front of my shorts.  The other light used was fitted with a snoot to provided the concentrated circle of light on the background behind me.