The Harpist

My wife Betsy plays the harp professionally. Saturday she called me after she had left for the day and said that a local wedding-expo she was planning to exhibit at wanted a picture of her to feature in their promos. She really doesn’t have anything appropriate (not my fault!) so she wanted to do a quick photo-shoot that afternoon. Because this was ad-hoc and short-notice, we couldn’t arrange for any interesting locations, so we just tore apart our living room to do it there.

This was lit with two Canon 580EX units. There was one camera-right at 1/8-power into a reflecting umbrella for fill, and the key was another camera-left also at 1/8-power, but direct with a 1/8-in Honl grid. This extra light helped keep the top of the harp and her head brightly illuminated, but the grid kept too much light from falling on the background. These were fired with a set of Cactus-V4 radio-frequency triggers. The industry standard for RF-triggers is “Pocket Wizard”, but those are terribly expensive. These Cactus units were ordered online and shipped directly from Hong Kong, but they were quite inexpensive and they work great.

We have talked about it before, but one-of-these-days I’m going to have to tag along to one of her wedding gigs and shoot her in-situ. Maybe I could even pretend to be one of the guests and practice some wedding photography too.

Canon 5DmkIII; EF24-105 f4L IS; ISO-200; 45mm; f4; 1/160-sec