Jesse Rosten

Had a little free time last week so I pulled together an impromptu shoot with some friends. This was an experiment to test out some lighting setups with on-axis fill.

On-axis light is light that is on the same axis as your camera lens; e.g. your on-camera flash. This kind of light illuminates everything very evenly, creating a flat, and generally unflattering image. It’s akin to xeroxing your subject. The idea here is to create shadow and depth with some off-axis lighting and then let the on-axis ring flash (AB800R) act as a fill and lift those shadows out of the dark. Daniel (pictured) mapped out the the setups on his nifty Strobox iPhone app. Also, the first pic in the gallery below is a 100% crop of the pic above. I put a lot of post work into these photos and don’t want the finer details to get lost to web resolution.