This past week was my birthday, so my best friend decided to throw a party for me!

He’s not he biggest party animal though

This shoot was a lot of fun to concept up.  Originally I was going to be included in the shot along with Kosmo, some balloons, and some Miley Cyrus decorations.  After having some difficulties obtaining all the props (except for Kosmo), I decided to simplify things a bit.

Luckily Kosmo is a good sport during shoots; he basically just laid there the whole time.  And if you look closely at the cupcake, you can see that the candle is nearly all the way burnt out.  The only difficulties that he gave me were that he would flinch when I would toss the confetti.

Lighting Info:

This setup was quite similar what I use in Lynn’s Watch Lola Grow project.
A B800 in a PLM to illuminate the background at about 2 stops over the main.
A B400 in a strip box (orientated horizontally) as my main light.
A B800 placed far camera left and pointed a few feet in front of Kosmo to illuminate the confetti.  The light was placed so far away to provide consistent exposure across the frame (that whole inverse square law thingie).

So, Christmas Eve we started getting some pretty nice snow with some large sized flakes.  Later that night I decided that I wanted to do a shot where I lit up the snow with different colors.  I originally intended on Christmas colors (green and red), but for some reason I put on a blue gel instead of green.  I’m sure it had to something to do with my concern for having my equipment getting wet from the snow, and wanting to hurry up, get the shot, and then bring everything back inside where it’s safe and dry.

The setup consisted of two small speed lights facing each other a couple of feet in front of the camera with the blue and red gels.  One was using a 42” bounce umbrella, and the other was a medium sized Westcott softbox.  The only reason that I didn’t use similar modifiers is because I didn’t have similar ones ;)
The key light was an AB800 placed between the gelled speed lights and us on camera right.  I had the PCB 22” beauty dish on it with the white sock.

Some minor adjustments were made in lightroom to bring up the luminance and saturation of the colored snow.

Additional Thoughts:

If I would have had extra time, I would have liked to have added a kicker light in the back to separate us a bit more from the background.  There’s a decent amount on Lynn’s left, but I would have liked some on my side.
Oh, I would have also liked to have used the green instead of blue gel too ;)