I had the pleasure of photographing Stefano Iaboni, an actor, clown, performer, and teacher originally from Rome. The goal was to capture Stefano’s interaction with his students in a physical comedy workshop. The challenge was that there was poor and uneven light, a studio space that the workshop participants were fully utilizing, and fast-moving subjects – but I think we nailed it!
Because of the fast-moving and unpredictable group dynamic, I wanted a really flexible lighting setup. After a little experimenting I settled on two alternative lighting schemes: A speed light behind a medium size shoot-through umbrella on a stand in one corner of the room, with another speed light with an octobox in the other corner set a little lower to balance, and a TTL speed light that I could switch to if I needed to shoot into either of the fixed lights. This worked pretty well on the whole, aside from burning out one of my flashes!