Lighting with Cookies to Create Big Shadows with Little Lights

Natural Cookies

I find all cookies useful depending on the situation. The easiest to come by is a natural cookie, and they seem to produce some of the most organic shadow patterns, as well. By natural I mean nature, as in pull some weeds or find a small branch no one will miss and there you go—you have a bona fide shadow-shaping tool. For this photo, we found ourselves on a nicely shaded sidewalk with a beautiful model, Madeline. After taking an initial photo, we quickly realized how boring our background was. After “borrowing” some vines from the fence and stringing them from a boom arm, I was able to fire a flash through them to mimic the dappled afternoon shadows, similar to the ones the trees had created earlier that day.