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 felling 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 behind one of the machines to give the photo a bright high-key effect. I wanted it to be bright and upbeat, rather than dark and gloomy looking (to match the mood/feel of the article it ran with). It also helped to get rid of some unwanted visual clutter in the background by doing this.

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.