Dick Reillo and Stella Jimenez during an outdoor winter portrait shoot, Thursday, March 13, 2014. Special effects were used to create the snow for the shoot, which was done on a clear night.

My good friends Dick Reillo and Stella Jimenez have been asking me to do a portrait of them in the snow for months. While there’s been no shortage of the real thing here in the Chicago area as of late, brutal cold and winds have accompanied almost all of our snow storms this season. With a successful portrait under the real thing looking doubtful, I assured the couple that I’d give them a snow picture one way or another.

Calling upon my theatrical lighting and effects experience, I remembered reading about instant mashed potato flakes making convincing falling snow when used on stage. Surely, if lit correctly, the same foodstuff would work on camera just as well. A quick trip to the grocery store landed me three giant boxes of the stuff. I would have paid good money for a photo of myself walking to the register with the boxes cradled in my arms. “He must be very hungry,” I’m sure other shoppers thought empathetically to themselves.

The two secret weapons, Hungry Jack instant mashed potato flakes and a large theatrical special effects fan, stand ready.

With fake snow in the bag, the next issue I had to tackle was how to get it into the air. I considered building a rig using a plastic window flower box with holes cut into the bottom that would sprinkle the flakes down (operated by someone holding it on a ladder), but this seemed like it would only work for a very tight closeup.

To get a broader and more random, natural look, I decided to use a fan to blow the flakes high into the air first, letting them fall back down in a non-uniform fashion. An everyday box fan wouldn’t be powerful enough, so I called in a favor to a longtime theatrical client and borrowed one of their extremely powerful (and heavy) special effects fans.

The portrait was lit with three fixtures. One to light the couple, one to back light the snow in the air, and one to light a tree in the far distance. I used a 1/2 CTO gel on the couples’ key light and set the camera white balance to 4250