My kids are working behind the scenes in the lighting department in the high school play this year, and sometimes my daughter comes home with random colored gels that are otherwise destined for the dumpster. I decided to use the red gels that she rescued from the high school for this month’s Camera Club challenge: RED.
As I was brainstorming, I had an idea to do a “devil” portrait – I remembered that we had devil horns up in the attic from an old Halloween costume… and a fog machine…
My husband modeled for me again, and as we started shooting we realized that the horns were a bit “much” so we experimented with a magnifying glass instead.
What was surprising to me is how powerful the gels were. All of these images are “straight out of camera” (except for the one below which shows before and after).
Without red gels. No flash. Just window light.
With red gels.
Here are the “behind-the-scenes” shots that show the red gels taped to the beauty dish on the right. There’s also window light coming in from the left. My F-stop was at 2.8, so there was a bit of ambient light coming in, which you can see on the left side of John’s face in the shots above:
Red gels taped to the beauty dish. Red mat board used as a background.
Window light coming in from the left.
Here’s one of the first shots with horns, gels and smoke.
Magnifying glass, eyes, ears and teeth……
And finally, some smoky roses:
