Lighting with Cookies to Create Big Shadows with Little Lights

Structural Cookies

In addition to natural cookies, we have doorways, window frames, and hanging blinds—all existing structures that just beg to have light thrown at them—to create those telltale shadows we’re so familiar with.I think of these as structural cookies and employ this technique a lot.

Here’s a great example of mimicking sunset through a windowpane, which adds tension to the photo as our model basks in the last few moments of sun before it set on her. Unfortunately, when we got to the location the sun was long gone and the room was dim and flat looking. In Issue #1, we discussed turning our flash into a mini portablesun. That’s just what we did here. After applying a full color temperature orange (CTO) trans-parent gel to a flash, we flew it up some 16’ in the air and shot it through the empty windowpane. Instantly, our setting sun was back, and better yet, it was movable and controllable, too.