I recently photographed a series of images for Kurij, an upstart soft drink maker. We wanted cool lifestyle images that were a bit fun and trendy, but with an underlying message that Kurij is for everyone to drink at any time. I wanted consistency of lighting and feel, so I chose a lighting theme and carried that through each image. The processing was guided by the client, with some images brighter or more saturated than others. They felt it was better to complement images individually, focusing on the flexibility of the drink; rather than keeping a consistent feel through all images and risk a single mood. I think this was a wise choice.

The standard lighting throughout the shoot was my single large OctaBox. I put a 12" reflector inside the center of the box to create an effect where the outside edge of the box is brighter. This causes softer falloff in the shadows. Most were shot with a 12-24mm nikkor lens to create an intimate feel. There's a tradeoff in lens selection. Longer lenses lack intimacy and a promote a feeling of voyeurism. The wide angles bring the scene more intimate, but there can be some serious distortion issues. I like to use wider lenses for this type of work, then work with composition to create an intimate image that is visually pleasing and reasonably true to perspective.

This image was lit with the 7' OctaBox placed outside behind the camera on a balcony. The strobe was firing in though large windows.

In this image, I placed the OctaBox to camera right and balanced with ambient from windows on the left.

This "Poker" image was shot differently. I bounced one of my Bowens strobes off the wooden ceiling and manually color balanced using a gray card. In the foreground, I placed a 48" reflector under the camera to recreate the soft fill light of the OctaBox. The important part of this image was to emulate the lighting of a poker game. I am satisfied that this requirement was met:

Here's an overview video on the processing of the guitar image:

A web-sized copy of the PSD file can be downloaded from the Repository if you would like to follow along and see how the layers work.