If you’re reading this in 2020, you probably know why I’m trapped at home. If you’re reading this many years down the line, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced people to quarantine themselves at home even if they are not sick. I won’t get into what the pandemic has done to the world but, I will say that I was at home without much to do.

Most of my photography takes place outdoors with hot air ballooning, and hiking. Only recently have I put money into getting lighting equipment to start creating my own images wherever the demand is. I’ve only used the lights for the head shots (like at Best Buy) and nothing else. Now with all of this extra time, I may as well try something new.

The overall concept was to make images that Best Buy would use. I dressed in my retail uniform and performed a couple of activities with products that customers would find in the Best Buy stores. The first activity was video gaming, and the second was cleaning with a vacuum cleaner.

Note: I forgot to take images of the setups so…. I’ll try explaining the lighting arrangements. Badly.

For the video gaming photos, I wanted to create a scene with vibrant colors to create an atmosphere that shows the intensity of the game I was [not] playing. I wanted blue as the overall color of the image, and red to just be on me. All three of my lights were on stands and fairly clustered close together. Blue gelled light pointing towards the window blinds. Red gelled light with a grid pointing towards me. And on last light facing camera left and up to the ceiling to make the light seem like it was coming from the TV.

As your can see on the two images published, the red was spilling a bit. A solution to this, that I of course came up with after, is to use a snoot. Lesson learned.

For the cleaning photo, I wanted to create a 9 o’ clock morning lighting for the room. Sure, I could have made this photo at 9:00 am, but, it was 10:00 pm and I had no interest in dragging the photo shoot to the next day.

I placed my key light in a 36” octabox on camera left, by the window, to act like sunlight coming through a window. I placed another light, in an octabox, right above the camera to fill in shadows. I placed my third light outside of the blinds to make it look like there was light outside. Although I can’t really say that I did a good job with making that look real.

What I definitely needed to do for this image was shoot it vertical. But, I didn’t have a tripod that can shoot vertical available. I left the tripod plate for that tripod at work… not getting that for another week.

In conclusion…

Overall, I think that I did a pretty decent job as a first-timer. Of course, there are some clear weaknesses to my images; take it easy on me though. Will I make more images at home? We’ll see…