Sometimes things don’t work out. I was testing out a technique to work with ambient light that I clearly had no handle on. That happens sometimes but fortunately processing tools come with cropping capabilities. Having the option to crop is awesome, but ideally you should try to not need it if possible. The less you have to crop during processing the more time you have to spend towards somewhere else.
Since my subject was showing a range of emotion, I just went with that. And since she had a flair for the dramatic, I went with grayscale for some of them. Gray scaling things reduces detail which amplifies the rest of the detail that is left behind. In this case, emotion is amplified. That stated, the busier a picture is the less effective gray scaling has on them.
For this set up I think it was just a single strobe with a softbox and grid on. I was waiting around before I headed off for a dress rehearsal, so I didn’t want to unpack all my gear. I kept it simple and attempted to work that previously mentioned ambient light technique. I’ll need to practice that more before I can go into it though.