Ok… for a long long time I have been interested in medicine in some form or another, so getting to go in this operating room to photograph this doctor was a kind of a cool experience for me. Not sure why… but operating rooms just kind of have a creepiness to them… you know that odd, eerie feeling that you get when you just go to the hospital… well imagine that feeling times ten and you got the feeling of being in an operating room. Anyway they said I was welcome to come back and photograph an actual operation sometime… is that not awesome? I am all in on that… yes I do love what I do. Read on if you care to hear how I lit the shot and why.

The doctor was lit with a single strobe / 23′ Westcott softbox and I put a bare-bulb strobe in the background on a floor stand pointed straight up at the ceiling. Two reasons for this… one I wanted the photo to have a bright and upbeat feel to match the feel of the article it was shot for. Two…. there was a a bunch of glass doored storage cabinets in the background filled with all kinds of stuff (visual clutter). Blowing it all out eliminated that problem in a time efficient way while giving me my bright upbeat feel.

I killed the overhead fluorescents in the room and actually kind of downplayed the OR table lights in the background. They turned out to be on the warm side in comparison to my strobes. I balanced them as needed in Photoshop.

All said and done, I was in and out of the hospital in a hour’s time. It always adds an interesting twist on things when you are working in a tight time period like that… but I figure it may have not been very cool if I held up the dude’s spinal surgery that was scheduled in that OR just minutes after I left.