Behind The Scenes - Me and My Shadow

Here’s one of the shots from my recent trip to The Studio Factory in Whitwick, albeit with this shot I wasn’t in the actual studio and I didn’t use studio lighting! The studio is on the first floor of an old textile factory and there are a lot of usable spaces on the ground floor too. As this was my second visit there I knew the potential so also took along my ‘strobist’ gear in the hope I’d get the chance to experiment with that – and this is one of the results.

I’d worked with Kerry at the previous shoot so she was happy to indulge my experiments. On the ground floor is a large warehouse area with huge Northlights giving a great deal of natural daylight into the space. Of course, my first reaction was to use my favourite technique of shifting white balance to make daylight blue. But this time I wanted to do a little more by placing the emphasis not on the daylight (as there was no window within the frame) but instead to show what happens to the shadow.

I found a nice white wall and got Kerry to create a dramatic pose that would have a great curve in her shadow. I used a CTO’d flashgun in my DIY snoot to provide a really hard light which would give a nicely defined shadow. I then had to position the light source carefully in relation to the camera and model so as to give the shadow the same height and proportion as Kerry.

The main thing to note about this shot is the colour of the shadow. You might ask why the shadow created by the flash is not black but blue. Well, the key point is that the shadow is not due to the absence of light but due to the absence of flash. The flash does not create the shadow but instead lights everything else that it lands on. The wall in the shadow area is the same colour and brightness as it would have been without the flash. The shadow is therefore the ambient light and the camera exposure therefore sets the brightness of the shadow. Due to the white balance shift all ambient light is made blue, hence there is a blue shadow. Cool isn’t it!

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