Club President strobe magic

[Garth Herrick]

Hi everyone,

Here are original and modified versions of a reference for a portrait I took two days ago. The gentleman is the president of a prominent club, who has engaged me to paint him and add his portrait to the more than fifty predecessor presidential portraits hanging in the ballroom.

I used a primary and secondary strobe (I only have the two monolights), then without moving the camera tripod, I moved one strobe to the rear to fill some light in the background. In Photoshop I sandwiched the two images, editing with an eraser tool to produce the modified version below.

I did this because I was not satisfied with the original illumination in the background and wanted lighting that better related to natural light through the windows.

Some technical details:
Camera: Nikon D3, AF Nikkor 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom ( actual focal length 62mm), f/7.1, 1/60 second, +1.0 EV, Flash white balance, ISO 200, RAW format, Adobe RGB colorspace, SD standard saturation setting.
Strobes: Calumet Travelite 750 kit (two 375 watt/second monolights, two 45 inch convertible umbrellas, two 12 foot light stands), two PC cords from the camera to each monolight, the principal light shot through the umbrella at medium power about six feet from the subject, and the secondary light shot reflected from the umbrella at lowest power about nine feet away.
Image processing: I had the camera connected ("tethered") via USB to a MacBook Pro laptop so the client could watch his own photo session in real time, using Aperture 2.0 as the software. From Aperture, I dragged the images into Photoshop as jpegs.

I'll admit, the camera is awesome! Any critique or thoughts are welcome. I am leaning toward the modified version for the portrait.

All the best,

Garth