There was suppose to be a shoot this weekend for a MUA (of whom I first met as a bride!) that wanted to update her portfolio…but that fell through last minute (for the second time) when two out of three models decide to flake! We were both really looking forward to this, ruined all the planning and time that Kasthury has put in the shoot!

Anyways, I decided I needed to bust out all the lights to shoot to make myself feel better. I picked up these boots last Friday, never really had boots before but these are nice and comfy.

I started out with SB-800s in two softboxes as rim lights just behind the boots, I liked how the large light source (relatively) reflected off the side of the boots sort of like a specular highlight. Then I moved one of the softboxes (camera left) towards the front as a bit of a fill to bring out some details between the shoes since I wasn’t getting any specular highlights off that side of the boots anyways. However, this left the boots blending into the dark background on the left side. I then added a snooted SB-800 as a kicker on camera left where I moved the softbox from to add a hard rim.

As suggested by many tutorials online, it is good practice to add one light in at a time when you are working with multiple lights to see how each one affects the image. Here’s how the lights in this setup affected the final image one by one. (Softbox CL, Softbox CR, Kicker)

I’m also abusing this backdrop quite a bit lately…was too lazy to grab the roll of seamless from the garage.. will need to go backdrop shopping again soon!