Thoughts after spending two days with a Nikon 750 in my hands.

This image has nothing to do with the content of this blog. 

I shot it with my friend, Noellia, for fun. 

It was done with the Nikon D750 and the Nikon 85mm f1.8G lens. 

I've spent the last two days shooting portraits for a company in Georgetown, Texas that does chemical engineering. We photographed 125 of their employees, one at a time, for use on a holiday card. It's an elaborate card that folds out and is used as a primary piece of marketing for the company. 

I set up a nine foot wide, soft blue seamless background and created a lighting design that would make people look good while minimizing skin texture. The background was lit by an Elinchrom 500 watt second moonlight that was suspended from the acoustic tile grid on the ceiling by a scissor clamp. We wrangled the cord over to the wall with a second scissor clamp made specifically for cable wrangling. We did this because the light needed to be exactly there and, as a side benefit, it kept a long cable run off the floor --- which makes for a safer set. 

I brought a flat, white three foot by four foot shiny masonry board for people to stand on. This contained the portrait subjects and kept them in the area that represented the "sweet spot" of my lighting design. It also made each engagement totally repeatable, as far as lighting and exposure were concerned. 

On either side of the subject I had black light absorbers parallel to them. These helped to put a darker edge on the white shirts everyone wore which should radically reduce the post processing work of making clipping paths. 

Finally, I had two 3 foot by 4 foot soft boxes set up as main light and fill light in front of and at 35 degree angles from the subject. These were both up high enough to cast shadows under the chins of my sitters which is a flattering way of defining the chin and neckline. Since the images would be clipped from the background we were highly uninterested in experimenting with shallow depth of field or experiencing the "bokeh" of our taking lens. We shot at f11 in the interest of keeping everything sharp and tidy.

The two front lights were Photogenic Powerlight PL1250 DR mono-lights in Photoflex soft boxes.

My assistant and I had some interesting times during