The Product is the belt. The patented article is the belt buckle. The lighting is simple but workable.

 

Self portrait against blue.

There are many times when we need to make photographs of people outside. If I lived in Scotland like Paul Reid I guess my biggest problem would be the Northern weather. It seems to be cool and cloudy there most of the time. Great for black and white and, I guess, malleable enough for color work. The biggest problem in Texas is also the weather. It seems to be bright and contrasty outside during the hours when we need to get work done. 

I was working on creating website content for a company called, Klik-Belt, and we were engineering a bunch of lifestyle shots down at Lady Bird Lake. Why not? It's about two miles from the office...

The issue we dealt with was the harsh sun on the day when models were available. There's always someone in my audience who shouts out, "Wait until golden hour! The light is better then." But those people don't always understand that we might have only one day budgeted to get a full roster of photographs and it's pretty much impossible to do dozens of set up shots in dozens of locations all within the time constraints of "golden hour." And there's no guarantee that the sunset at end of the day will produce beautiful light. Weather is fickle and we might have clear skies all day and cloud cover right at the end. Just when we don't need it. 

Part of the professional's job is to have solutions that allow us to work through the day in stride. Either by controlling existing light or adding our own to a scene. As you can see, on this shoot we chose to modify the existing light. It was expedient and shooting against foliage helps compress the dynamic range of a scene. 

I used a four foot by four foot, 2 stop, diffusion scrim directly over our model. I knew we had it positioned correctly when I looked down at the shadow of the subject and saw that he was completely covered by the shade of the modifier. The exposure is easy. It's about 1.75 stops down from an incident metered daylight exposure. My client was pressed into service to hold the scrim and the light stand since there always seems to be a nice breeze near open water. 

The shot just above is one of maybe 35 or 40 we were able to get done on this particular day. We shot 15 or so set-ups in the studio in the morning and the rest of the photos (outside) were done after lunch. Not every client has unlimited budgets for multi-day shoots so we tried to plan well, figure out travel logistics in advance and carry along a lot of props. 

Photographing jobs like this is a pleasure. Especially when your models are fun to be around and totally collaborative with the process. 

I seem to get a lot of use out of pop-up light modifiers. They are efficient, easy to pack, lightweight and cheap. They also double as portable shade when the sun is at its maximum intensity. 

Go ahead and wait for happy hour. We'll spend the day shooting.