I was recently on a photoshoot for St. Mary's College of Maryland. Among the usual classroom, teacher/student interaction, campus-life candids, etc. The folks at the Admissions department wanted me to photograph "hallway bowling". This proved to be trickier than they thought it would be, and we had less than an hour to get it done. It was dark in the dorm hallway - too dark to capture anything sharply without pushing the camera to a grainy 3200 ISO. That wasn't going to cut it - I needed to light it. If you can imagine shooting down a long hallway, there's no place to put lights without them being in the shot. That wasn't going to work. How would the old guys have done it back in the day? I don't know, but this is the 21st Century... cue the magic of digital photography.
I started out by photographing the bowling pins, and the bowling... er... soccer ball in the empty hallway using the overhead lights and a tripod. I then had my assistant take a strobe on a stand and hold it over each additional element of the photograph... the bowler, and each group of spectators. Keeping the camera on the tripod made it easy to put all of the elements together into the final shot without seeing any of my lights.
Pretty cool. I love digital photography.
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