If you are like me, there are times when an exotic location or even professional studio is a luxury rather than something you have regular access to.  Thankfully, you don’t always need an exotic location to get the type of shot you want.  Sometimes a driveway is really all that you need.

For this little experiment I used just two lights and a softbox and went out in the driveway to see what I could come up with.  I used a SB-800 in a 43” Westcott softbox and an SB D80X with DIY gobo.  The lights were triggered with Cybersyncs.  I shot for about 10 minutes and walked away with about 15 pictures.  For a more in depth look, here is a quick video I put together.  It covers some initial planning, shooting, and also a bit of post processing.

On a funny side note, you can see my big rear end kind hobble around in the video with a bit of a limp.  Well, turns out I have a form of arthritis in my right foot.  Just found that out this very week. It only took 2 doctor’s visits and 5 different prescriptions to figure that out.  I did what I could to edit the video to not make me look like an injured goon, but sometimes I just can’t avoid it. 

Before I post some of the results (some are in the video), I wanted to explain briefly about the DIY gobo.  Gobo simply means “go between” and it is something that you can use to avoid lens flare.  For these headshots, I wanted some light behind the subject to pull him off from the background, but didn’t want any flare heading my way.  Not having a ton of money to just go out and buy something, and needing to do this quickly, I just grabbed some cardboard and made my own.  Thank you, Velcro.

If you want to make your own, there are much better write-ups than mine, trust me.  I also would have really liked to have had a better sunset than I did, along with one more Speedlight.  Even still, I was happy with the outcome.  I have some better DIY GOBOs currently in the works that don’t so…well…DIY. 

As for the results, here you go.  I should have mentioned that before I started this off, I saw all of these as black and white.  I believe there was only a single photo delivered as color, with some texture treatment to it, but for the most part, they were meant to be black and white.