And Now For Something Completely Different:

This week I had an assignment for The Sun to illustrate a story on book clubs. I am going to write a detailed On Assignment for it later this week, but I wanted to throw the final photo out as a reverse engineering exercise first.

So, to be clear, you are looking at the result and trying to backwards-engineer the lighting involved. If you wanna play, take a moment to analyze the light and leave a note describing how you think it was done in the comments section.

Don't hide behind vagueness. You explanation should allow someone to reproduce the look - in camera. There was only minimal Photoshop: Curves correction and the cleaning up of some sensor dust. Nothing fancy.

I'll even give you this much: It was lit with an SB and one small continuous light source. Oh, and there was a ziplock baggie involved. There, I've told you too much already.

You can see it big here. I'd suggest looking around the individual chairs for clues about the lighting.

Please note that your comments will have to be moderated, (otherwise, it's spam city around here) so they will not appear until I have a chance to move them. But I do moderate comments several times a day.

Have fun, and beware unnecessary complications.

Now, I am off to try to clean my dusty camera sensor for the very first time, using one of those Copper Hill sensor cleaning jobbies.

I will write about my sensor-cleaning results later. Hopefully without long streams of profanity.