In late November I walked into the town’s Pier 1 with the plan to buy a Japanese lantern. I’d had the idea to shoot using once since seeing one at a friend’s home during the summer. By luck I walked in right in the middle of a huge clearance sale on the lanterns. So instead of leaving with one or two as I’d planned, I left with about ten lanterns in various sizes from a huge sixteen inch to a few small four inch lanterns.
Nyxon got to be my first test subject as we shot together a few days later. Lighting with the lantern turned out to a little tricky. It puts out a small amount of light so it requires a very still model and longer exposures to get the effect I wanted. Still putting the camera on a tripod allowed me to get a few interesting shots such as this multiple expose of Nyxon. As before, Nyxon was a joy to work with given the experimental nature of this shoot along with some fake snow I’ll be posting more about later.
Second shoot using the lanterns came during my shoot with Kerri Taylor. Kerri and I had discussed shoots a few times before, but this was the first time we’d been able to connect. Really enjoyed working with her, and she did well for the lantern portion of our shoot. As always having done this once I was able to try some more interesting things with Kerri trying to take advantages of the strengths of the lighting. I especially like the first one below where she’s looking up into the lantern.
My third time working with the lantern came in a shoot with Melissa Troutt later in December. Here I felt more open to trying some new ideas and playing with some new poses. Here the idea was to pull more into her interacting with the lantern. As always, Melissa did great work yielding the photos below.
Overall I like the lantern. The light is a bit harder than I’d expected, but I have some ideas to go from here. I have an LED bulb that can do some color options that I think will be interesting to pair with this. I also plan to explore adding in more lanterns.
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