ASSIGNMENT: THE PIANIST

Today's post is, again, about an assignment - and, again, about one I pulled off using small flashes. This time, the victim subject of the assignment was a young Turkish pianist, Ayca Yilmaz, whom I shoot before one of her recent many concerts in Istanbul. Here one of the pictures out of the set, the rest of the story, information about the lighting and of course more images after the break.

Turkish pianist Ayça Yilmaz, Istanbul 2012

OK, so here we go. The main problem with this shooting was, as often happens, the venue; the concert hall was actually in a museum, and more specifically in its temporary exhibitions' section: so, while the building was very beautiful per se, the exhibition's setting was - to say the least - uninspiring, with movable walls painted in some sort of tan color and filled with framed Ottoman art. To get rid of the walls, I underexposed the ambient to the point of semi-darkness, and relied on flash only for the lighting of the shoot, planning on relying heavily on rim light to separate her from the semi-black background, while adding some "stage light" look to the pictures. For the shot above, I used 4 Speedlights, 3 SB-700 and 1 SB-910 - starting with the SB-700s, I got one behind the pianist, one (with softbox) in front of her slightly left of camera, a third one to light the inside of the piano; lastly, I used the SB-910, cabled to my Nikon D3x, to act as a Master.

Using more or less the same setup, and taking advantage of the triangles created by the lines of the pianos' stringboard and lid to frame her, I took a couple more photographs:

Turkish pianist Ayça Yilmaz, Istanbul, 2012

Turkish pianist Ayça Yilmaz, Istanbul, 2012

Then, I decided to move on to a second setup: the chairs in the hall were actually pretty nice and old, so I decided to shoot Ayça from the backstage and towards the public to put the chairs to some use as background. Here I used 5 SB-700s: 2 were deployed to light the chairs, one again behind her as a rim light, one in front of her in the piano and one placed camera right to light her left arm - the SB-910 was still used as a Master only for this frame:

Turkish pianist Ayça Yilmaz, Istanbul, 2012

Last but not least, I decided to play with flare a bit to push the "stage light" concept a bit further, and moving a bit the lights from the image above, I got this final image:

Turkish pianist Ayça Yilmaz, Istanbul, 2012

The whole shoot, from start to finish, took about one hour including setup.

Now for the technical stuff (click to go to the related product page): all images shown here have been shot with a Nikon D3x, equipped with the Nikon 50mm f/1.4 AF-S and the Nikon 85mm f/1.4 AF-S; lighting was provided by 6 Speedlights: 1 x SB-910 & 5 x SB-700; to support the Speedlights, a Joby GorillaPod, 2x Manfrotto 5001B stand and 2 x Photoflex LS2214 8ft Stand have been used. Photos have been developed in Nikon Capture NX 2 and finished in Adobe Photoshop CS6.

Thank you for reading this far, and see you soon on the blog! Stay tuned for more...

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