Last Sunday, I went to a UW Garage shoot, hosted by the Seattle Flickr Meetup. The UW Garage shoots are a a tradition that I help started when I first started learning off-camera lighting; I wanted people to practice with. We invade my alma mater, the University of Washington’s parking garage and share photographic resources (lights, stands, triggers, and recently, models) and practice our lighting and photo techniques as a collective group.
It’s a cool event – our little crew had been featured on Strobist.com, YouTube videos, and Chase Jarvis’s video blog.
Here’s an outfit that Emily wanted to be photographed in. The moment the sunglasses went on, I knew I was in trouble. The curvature of the sunglasses, coupled with the mirror surface, meant that there’s really no way to hide the light source in the final image.
When I see a mirror surface like that, I know I have to create a large enough light source to try to fill the family of angles that the mirror surface will reflect. So I moved Emily away from the white wall that I was shooting her against, and used that as a reflector for my two flashguns. Note that now I’m between the wall and the subject and is backlit in the shot above.
To make myself easier to remove from the image, I took the secondary diffuser fabric from my Photek Softlighter, and poked the camera lens through it. Now, I can “camoflage” myself underneath the Photek’s diffuser:
Much better. The light thrown by the wall also lights up the softlighter’s diffuser, which makes me that much easier to remove.
A little bit of touch-up in lightroom (edit brush, +4EV exposure comp) and we are left with the final image:
(and this is now her facebook profile image, so I know I did something right 
).
Additional Resources:
Seattle Flickr Meetup Group [Discussion forum | Meetup.com Webpage]
Strobist.com – to learn more about off camera lighting