I don’t want to turn into what photoblogoplugopalyst David Hobby likes to call a “lighting photographer” — but it seems that in most of the photography I’ve done lately, the main challenge has been how to light it.

What’s quickly becoming my go-to setup for situations in which I don’t really know what I’ll be getting myself into (in other words, about 99% of them) is a simple rig to which I alluded in a previous post: a shiny 16-inch reflector (aka “beauty dish”) as a main light, backed up by on-axis fill from an on-camera ring light attachment (the Orbis flash bagel thingie discussed in a deluge of previous posts.)

I’m liking this setup better than other no-brainer light solutions such as umbrellas and fill cards, simply because it’s easier to handle: smaller to pack, simpler to maneuver through doorways, etc. With the dish-plus-flash unit mounted on a lightstand and the ring light attached to my camera by a bracket, I’ve got a fairly versatile rig that I can easily pick up and carry from spot to spot.

These two shots, from a batch I did earlier this year for a university-based dance troupe called the Moving Company, show how it all goes together. The Moving Company was doing a project with an art museum in which they were staging tableaux vivants echoing figures seen in some of the artworks in an exhibit.

The exhibit focused most of the gallery lighting on the walls, so I knew I’d have to bring my own lighting for the center of the room, where the dancers would be. To make sure the artworks were visible, I had to set my basic exposure for the walls — which required using 1000 ISO to keep a hand-holdable shutter speed of 1/30 @ f/2.8 or so. The gallery lighting consisted of tungsten lamps, so I had to put amber filters over my two shoe-mount flash units to make them match.

With that done, all I had to do for each setup was position the dish-on-a-lightstand to provide dramatic lighting on each tableau, then punch up enough power in the ringlight to keep the shadows from going too dark. Then on to the next tableau.

Nothing fancy, nothing very impressive — just a simple solution that usually works. And for the 99% of the time when I don’t really know what I’m doing, that’s the way I like it.