The word came down yesterday of the need for a "sexy" photograph of a new Microsoft keyboard for a business section review by Mike Himowitz. The idea was to centerpiece the story, so I had to pull something out the top of my usually vacuous head. Thus I trudged to the studio on the first floor absent an idea of what to do; except maybe throw a gel of some color into the lighting mix. Lightning, at least a small bolt, would need to strike at some point.

In the studio, nicely neat after its last use (nice surprise No. 1), I started rummaging to find something to use as a base for the keyboard. There was not enough of the smaller white seamless, so that was right out. But then: BING! It hit me -- white acrylic spread across two saw horses with a light underneath. WooHoo! Saved. The effect would create the modern, clean feel I figured necessary for the expensive piece of hardware.

The small light stands in the studio were not low enough to allow the light space under the acrylic. So I improvised using a sand bag, the Profoto compact monolight attached to a stud screwed into one of the short stands legs.

With that fix in place, I could move to the light with a gel, also a Profoto monolight. The choice was quickly made to use purple. The blue seemed to be too dark and the red too menacing. Yellow did not seem like a color associated with technology. Purple just "felt" right. The gel would also help keep the results from looking like an Apple product ad. The color was a necessary element to differentiate, somewhat, from the classic ad campaign image Apple has created over the years with their imaginative products.

I put the fill, with the color gel and the reflector set to its narrowest angle, on a stand to the left and rear of the expected camera position. It was almost directly behind at 11 o'clock. It ended up at about 1/4 power setting.

After a lot of testing, to get some semblance of proper exposure, I decided to use a scrim over the key light to lower the exposure some -- it was dialed down as low as it could go and the reflector at its widest -- and spread the light more evenly under the table. It is a piece of decorative paper once used in a food session.