As the London 100 Strangers get together wound up, we wandered back to Liverpool Street from Brick Lane, gathering to get a few last pictures together around Spitalfields.

Opera singer Holly swished past me a speed, and her sweep of tartan and billowing hair saw me leap after her. Fairly sceptical at first, she agreed to take part as was a fantastically good humoured subject as we walked over to an interesting background made by some industrial venting on the side of one of the buildings.

Unfortunately, my concern that private security would pounce upon us at any moment and so in swiftly deploying umbrella and reflector I neglected our conversation a little. Fortunately Peter and Colin had come and learnt from the amazingly bubbly Holly that she was en route to Guildhall for her opera practice, in preparation for Glyndebourne auditions. She was superb fun and full of energy and a learning point from this encounter is for me to make sure that in erecting lights and evading would-be-Jack-Bauer’s, I don’t neglect the story-side of things.

Info for Strobist;

The lighting set up here is very similar to Diana’s portrait, with the key light coming from a Canon 600EX-RT with clip on diffuser, fired with a ST-R3-ET on ETTL at -1 EV through a 43″ white shoot through umbrella boomed out on a normal light stand to hover downwards in front of Holly’s face. Meanwhile, there’s a 1.2m white reflector just below shot parallel with the umbrella. Thanks to Colin and Peter for holding those! You can just see the umbrella and background above the smooching couple in this shot of Barbara’s, as we were shooting in the distance.

This is portrait #97 of my 100 Strangers Project – check out the group page and get involved.

Ongoing travel has been slowing both my catching up with others, and my processing/dispatch of stranger shots! I’ve been focusing on the latter to get pictures out to everyone that kindly stopped, so apologies a busy workload continues to impact my availability on Flickr! Hope everyone is extremely well!