“Not Tonight Honey, I Have a Headache” | 52.4 | Larger view

Into week four and thankfully a few ideas are still milling around in my head.  This idea was one that I had the entire week but waited, due to a grueling schedule, until the very end to shoot. As with a lot of my images, I enjoy humor, and it is easier to poke fun at yourself than worry about offending some oversensitive person.

As with last week’s image, one might argue that the post-processing removed any hint of off-camera lighting that was used.  My argument to that is I wanted the foundation image to look a certain way prior to working the image in post.  That “certain way” could not be done with the ceiling fan light or night stand lights. Each week I am trying to do something a little different with the lights as that is the only way that I am going to learn them inside and out.

For the setup, I used an Alien Bee Ring Flash (ABR800) and Nikon SB-800 Speedlight.  The ABR800 was shot into a cloud diffuser, high camera left and the SB-800 was shot into a Calumet reflective umbrella, high camera right.  The camera was tripod mounted dead center, pointing toward the bed.  The camera was set on a 10 second timer.  Lights fired with CyberSyncs. Here is a setup shot:

My challenge with this was not the lighting or the setup, but getting everything in the shot that I wanted.  I wanted the nightstands, entire bed, some of the wall, and both of me.  I wanted it obvious that I was in bed, so I did not want to zoom in too far to do that.

Had a lot of fun processing this one as well.