The Stormtroopers are presented within the Star Wars universe, provided with a white metallic armor that covers them completely and are responsible for maintaining order in the galaxy. In the series, these stormtroopers served as reminders of the Emperor’s power, extensions of his will, and a method of keeping the Empire’s hundreds of star systems under the yoke of fear.
More than the role of these soldiers I always liked their helmet and their mysterious dark visor that did not allow to see the eyes of the character. A few years ago I took a picture at the Barcelona Comic Fair, but this time I wanted to integrate it “in the galaxy”.
Nowadays, with tools like Photoshop it is quite easy to take a studio photograph and insert any background. However, the result is much more integrated if we actually do the assembly in camera. For many, many years there have been image projectors for use with fash, but they have always been very expensive.
There have also been artists who have used these gadgets in a political way as I have already mentioned in another post. And I myself have developed one of them in a homemade way years ago as you can see in this other link.
The interesting thing today is that Godox has developed the very practical and inexpensive AK-R21 accessory that does this with great ease. Many photographers use it to project “gobos” on a person’s body, but I wanted to integrate these backgrounds into a portrait.
There are six kits of 10 slides each, giving Godox a choice of 6 backgrounds for experimenting with setups. I tried the AK-S04 kit as it contains images of outer space and I wanted to make it look like a stormtrooper was shooting in space.
- Gobos
For this I used two Godox AD200 Pro fashes. One projected the “outer space” with the AK-R21 accessory and the other one I placed directly towards the helmet. The important thing here is that the direction of the light that illuminated the character had the same direction as seen in the slide. It also had to have the same contrast, so I did not use any modifiers in order to achieve an extremely hard light beam with a high contrast.
Since the studio is white and bounces a lot of light, I had to place a “black flag” so that the light from the fash directed at the character would not affect the background. Finally place another black flag on the right side for maximum contrast in the shaded areas of the hull.
- Godox AD200 Pro
Lighting scheme
Lighting scheme 1
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