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Jon Erlien

How I photographed Comic Con portraits using only one light source

Apr 18, 2017 by Jon Erlien 22 Comments
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Back in December my brother asked me if I would be interested in going to Comic Con in Indianapolis, IN, and I immediately said absolutely! In his mind, he was excited to see what comic books he could find or the hard to find vinyl POP figure or possibly a GI Joe collectible, but in my mind I knew I was going there to photograph people in their costumes.

These couldn’t be just any images though… I mean come on, the lighting at the event is going to be gross, the crowds will be huge, I’ll have to fight for space… This seems like 360 degrees of complexity. So, I start thinking to myself “how can I make the subjects stand out from the crowd?”, I got it! I’ll do one speedlight in my 26″ Westcott Rapid Box attached to my mono pod, I’ll expose for the environment to be dark and then have the light just kiss the top half of the subject. There was one issue though, I needed someone to hold the light. I was in luck! My younger brother who lives in the area was also attending Comic Con and he is a photographer too. I reached out to him, told him what I was thinking, and he was in.

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