Justin Cary Photography

Film school seems like 100 years ago… but every shoot I pull another trick out of the FS bag of tricks. This is a standard way of controlling on location lighting when your shooting tungsten indoors.

I was recently hired by a home remodeling company to take high end professional photos of their amazing work. It dawned on me that I will be taking photos of kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms and so on. Rooms that seem big when you’re hanging out become very very small when your photographing them… FACT!

Here’s one trick I used to control my color temperature. I was shooting at a WB of 3200K. The light coming in from the windows was, I’m guessing, about a 5200K cool temp. I grabbed some 1/2 CTO and covered the visible and non visible windows that would be casting light into the room. What does this do? CTO is a filter/gel that corrects daylight to tungsten. When you are shooting indoors the color temperature of the lighting inside is much warmer than the sunlight outdoors. This is how you correct that to get nice consistent warm tones throughout your photos. Here are some examples.

Please email me if you have any questions. I’d love to help you out!!!

Here’s a simple light setup I used for a shot during our shoot yesterday.  Depending on the shoot I’ll use strobes or hot lights.  In this situation I chose to use my hot lights so I could control my Depth of Field by keeping it super shallow.  I used my Photoflex Starlight kit which is the first set of lights I bought 4 years ago.  I quickly found that you can’t use these in very many situations for still photography but they worked great here.  To the models right you’ll see a nice soft blue light seperating him from the background.  That is the ambient light coming from outside, it really turned out great.  My Photoflex kit is Tungsten balanced so the daylight really pops.

I did a shoot for a local magazine today, I had a great time.  The images you see below WILL NOT make it into the magazine, they’re wayyyy too conservative for that.  That’s not a bad thing, it’s just their style.  Anyway, got some great stuff and worked with some very talented models!!!

I’ve been playing around with this editing style for quite sometime… I’m waiting for someone to use it in a publication.  It prints so well and has a great editorial look.  I’d love to see it in a mag…  Maybe I need to work with some national magazines before that will happen, we’ll see!

I’m tired… up late last night… up early this morning… 2 hour shoot lugging generator and lights around… thanks to the guys in Intercept for moving the genny around everywhere!  Preview, there will be more.

I just want to say thanks to everyone that made today’s shoot possible…  It’s refreshing to get a team of people that work well together and that’s what went down today.  Here’s a little sample, you’ll have to pick up a copy of the April Splurge Magazine to see the rest!