How’d I Light That: The Droid X a Year Later

One year later

A year ago this week I told my former boss I was going to be late to work one day that week.  As it turns out it was a Thursday that I packed up my Motorola droid (still in grace -return period for Verizon) and exchanged it for the Droid X.  Not to long after that I wrote a blog post with a photograph very similar to this one.  The main difference is, in today’s photo there is no iOS device.  Since that time, I’ve been able to distance myself entirely from the Apple ethos and ecosystem.

This phone stand before you one year old and still outperforms 65% of the smartphones on the market today.  I don’t know if my next Android smart phone will be Motorola or not but I must say this phone has and will continue to be a workhorse.

Now on to the lighting:

I really wanted to model the photo after the Verizon adds depicting the Droid X enveloped in red: 

As you can see from the setup shot, I had the main light gelled with 2 red gels and it was gridded.  The key light, coming from camera right, was set at the lowest power setting (1/64th) and it was gobo’ed with two honl gobo’s and a piece of my camera bag.  Even at 1/64th power the flash output was too great so I had to cover half the speedlight effectively taking it down to 1/128th power.  You may ask, why even bother with this key light but, you’ll notice that the hard key light really pulls the right and left edge of the phone out from the darkness of the background.  That, in turn, made the phone pop out from the background.

-Matt

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Tags: D300, Flash, How'd I Light That!!?

• July 12, 2011
• Photography
• 2 comments