INTRO

Markus and Jana from Saberproject were in the studio last Friday. The Saber Project is a Star Wars re-enactment troop that specialise in the high art of light-saber fighting (if you look at their website you will lots of video example).

Your father’s light saber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times… before the Empire.- Obi-Wan

The Shoot

The difficulty in photographing Jedi and Sith in the studio is that the light saber can easily be drowned out by the studio strobe. Although the sabers are very bright in a dark room they are easily drowned out by the studio strobes. The challenge was to get a studio photo but not have the models just standing there holding a white stick. OK I could just add the light-sabers in Photoshop but that would be to easy.

Making of.

I took a few light readings to gauge how bright the swords actually are. I needed to find the lowest ISO and the fastest shutter speed i could find and still have usable settings in the studio. The results was about f4.5, 1/60th, ISO 400 +- a bit depending on the colours being used. Next I set-up the lowest powered flash head in the studio (a Bowens 200ws) with a “32cm 45° High Performance Parabolic Reflector” (just seen in the making of top right) with a honeycomb grid. I taped over parts of the honeycomb grid so that only a narrow beam of light came from the small flash head. This way it acted kind of like a snoot or barn-doors, an i was only lighting the face of the subject.

Once I had an acceptable exposure we could set up the black background and dark coloured several curtains hanging here and there (these we used to hide the gobos in the background and ad depth to the photo. Behind the gobo left was a smoke machine and behind the gobo right was a Bowens 400ws flash with a colour gel holder (both can be seen in the making of photo above). Every time the Jedis’ changed the colour of their Light Sabers we changed the colour of the gel to contrast. Red-Blue , Green-Red, Orange-Blue etc etc etc.

I Had a lot of fun shooting with Jana, Markus and Thorsten. And I cant wait for the Empire to Strike back this Friday :).

The Force will be with you. Always. – Obi-Wan