This is a picture of my daughter with her first broken board. She broke this poor bit of lumber in a fit of anger whilst imagining her brother’s face on the other side. I kid. It was during her taekwondo class in preparation for her first belt test. She broke it on her first try, and it wasn’t even that hard, she reported afterward.
For those interested in the photography details, that shot was made with a flash behind a shoot through umbrella high above the camera, and another flash, snooted, directly behind her. My daughter and wife both like this picture, but it isn’t the one I wanted to create.
The one I wanted to create, or one close to it, is at the bottom of this post. I had envisioned a dramatic recreation of the breaking event. I wanted to light her from one side, with just a hint of light coming from the other side. And I wanted to be looking up her leg and body through the split board.
I was able to execute the large parts of that vision–the board, the leg, the body, the lighting. But for some reason it just didn’t work. It didn’t click. It doesn’t really come together as a finished image quite like I’d hoped.
The majority of the light is from two strip lights, aligned horizontally camera right. I still haven’t rebuilt them (with the holidays and all) so they tend to throw light all over the place. So I spent a lot of her energy just trying to get the spill reduced. By the time that was fixed (with a black shower curtain from Halloween) I realized I had no light hitting the board leaving that part of the image mostly up to the imagination of the viewer. So I had to trigger another flash toward the board, but not contaminate the rest of the scene. Finally, with all the technical details essentially fixed, there was really not a lot of patience left in either subject or photog to get the pose or expression just right, or mess with the lighting any more. So I took 5 minutes to reset the arrangement and shot the more comfortable image above.
Oh well. Not everything works out perfectly. I think the image below would be better with the strip lights higher up, and more light coming from camera left. Some day I’ll remake the strip lights out of black and white foam core so I don’t spend 20 minutes just fiddling with them. My daughter was a great sport throughout the shoot. I’m just glad I ended up with one Facebook-profile-worthy image.