I was hired by Compendium Inc. to photograph their new series of greeting cards and the displays they are going to be sold from. That posed an interesting challenge. I love shooting still life, but their style is a bit different from the one I usually go for. They wanted bright images, with a strong 'natural light' feel to them. This is sometimes easier to be said than done here in the NW, where natural light is often rapidly changing during the day. My solution was to shoot with mixed light, putting the displays (and the model in another similar shoot) next to a large window and letting the natural light to work as a global fill, about 1.5 stops below key. Then I put a large softbox 6ft high on camera right to be the main light source, well aligned with the windows. Then a strip light behind the display on camera right and two smaller ones pointing and the white background. To give the image a bit more of a 3D 'punch' (but while under the watchful look of the AD, to stay consistent with the Compendium look ) I used as a cheap ring flash adapter as fill. The flash was mounted on an on-camera Canon Speedlite. So umm, five lights total. Note: this set up requires your other strobes to have optical slaves.
Have you noticed that the format of the blog posts has changed?
