Lighting setup #208 Lyen Wong jumping

One of my followers on Twitter just asked me how we did shoot photo #208. This photo depicts my friend Lyen Wong performing a jump. This was a part of her show which made her Miss Universe Shape 2005. Of course, in her show she did not perform this jump nude, but for our fine art shooting and for the joy of her fans she allowed me to cover her great body with light and shade only.
It was not so easy to take the photo but then again, it might be much simpler than a lot of people think. For this photo Lyen took a running jump through a lighting setup with two striplights. She literally “jumps through a wall of light”.

From the perspective of the camera the striplights are a bit behind her body. Their angle made it necessary to use gobos in order to shield the lens from stray light. Before Lyen started jumping we first tried out the lighting. We determined the best position for her between the lights. Our goal was to show her beautiful muscles. Now her challenge was to jump in a way that she reached the highest point of her jump just at that sweet spot of the lighting. And my challenge was to hit the shutter just at the right moment. Sounds hard but in fact it was relatively easy for both of us. It took about 6 jumps to come to the result shown in photo number 208. On the other hand, I still wonder if there is a more clever, more bullet proof way to shoot something like this than just rely on the synchronized timing of model and photographer. However, in case of our nude jump it worked just fine.

What we learned the hard way when making this picture: Don’t let your model do long jumps on a studio floor which is covered with paper. In our case we used the black backdrop and we had the black paper covering round about 3 meters of the studio floor. Even though the edge of our paper was taped to the ground, after a couple of jumps the paper tore under Lyens foot when she was landing from her jump. She slipped and fell down very hard onto the side of her hip. Fortunately she did not injure herself seriously. A bit of ice pressed to her hip bone numbed away the pain and after some minutes we could even continue our shooting. However, I nearly got a heart attack when I saw her slipping and falling down. Using the paper as an underground was very unnecessary as none of my photos showed any of the paper underneath her feed. Stupid me. However, we were both really pleased with the photo that we made.