The Thriller Halloween Party

How do you take some black sheets, light stands and desire to do a good job, and put together a good set of Halloween portraits in an unknown area?
When you show up at a Hotel you never really know what you are going to get from a lighting or power or space perspective...  As it turned out I had just enough space, a little bit out of the way to be able to capture some good images of folks who spent a lot of time getting dressed up for Halloween.  At TheThriller.ca dance party I set up to capture some portraits and get my ears blown off.

I brought with me five light stands to hang black backgrounds from and two more for a couple of my Elinchroms, and set up starting as you see above, between the wall on the left and the pillar on the right.  I used a 10 x 20 Background canvas as a background/seamless so that the 20' part ran down that back wall and right out to where you see those stands.  I had the subjects stand on the canvas, and positioned my big softbox camera left, and a reflector/grid in the back right.  I also hung a black king-size sheet from the pillar in the back right out, parallel to the wall on the left,  to remove ambient light coming from the dance floor (off to the right) and reflection from the big softbox on the left.

In the case of the images I have here the camera was essentially in the same spot as it was with the image at the top showing the hotel ballroom setup as it was... just need to ensure you keep the lights away from that black background as there is very little post to do ... at least on the backgrounds.  I did touch up some skin in a couple places where blemishes weren't adding anything of value, but in general the bulk of these are almost completely "out of the camera". A little Aperture here and there to Dodge up some hilights where necessary and away we go.

These are some of my favs for the night in that the people were really fun, or had done a ton of work on their costumes, or both.  More of these images can be found on my archive site: archive.mciphoto.com in "TheThriller-Portraits" gallery.