
Well in my mind photography is basically about using light to "paint" the image. A painter uses paints, I use light. I recently did a themed shoot that was all horror and creepy stuff. The image here, Vampire Family Reunion, is one of the shots. This shot is basically "as shot". I did a dodge on a couple of faces because they were too light. But other than that I did not do any photoshop touch ups. It was shot in the afternoon about three hours before sunset. The red leaves are from a light with a red gel. The lighting from the two sides are from strobes, one with a softbox and one with an umbrella. There was one shot before the lights were set up and it was very flat and just not interesting at all. This photo took an honors rating at our local camera club judging. What I think really makes this photo is the intense colors and shadows that are created using the effects of the lights.

There are two ways to remotely trigger a strobe. One is optically. when the strobe sees another strobe going off it goes off. The other way is with radio triggers that use radio waves. OK, you can use cables too, but almost no one does that any more. For optically triggering the light the strobes have to "see" one another. The light behind Kim was optically triggered from the one next to me. The one in the stairwell could not "see" either of the other two lights though. So I put a radio trigger on it, just like the light next to me. I would have had radio triggers on all the lights, but forgot one of the triggers. Silly me. But I always prefer radio triggers to optical when on location. FYI, speedlights that talk about remote triggering are always talking about optically triggering each other.
OK.. that was a bit of an off topic aside. Here is the on topic point though. With the strobes I was able to get some good keylight in Kim's hair. I was able to light up the stairway so that it was not just some dark bland hole. I was able to get good lighting on the shadow side of her. The light in the stairwell also helped to separate Kim from the background too.
