Sunday, January 22, 2012

#3 - 52 Weeks Lit Up

This week was all about a hi-key portrait (not of me!!!) and simpicity.

I've been thinking about this all week and it came together quickly with very few adjustments which is to be expected when you're essentially only working with a single light.

To achieve the light, bright hi-key feel I wanted to try out shooting straight into my large softbox. Of course I would need a fill light on my subjects (my beautiful wife and daughter) so to keep with the soft feel I broke out my second, smaller softbox (hence the name) to act as the key fill light.

First set up was with the second box (roughly 3'x2'; the smaller of the two) vertically oreinted and in-front of Nic and Lilly (and ever so slightly to the right so I could still see them). I set the backlight to about 1 stop brighter than the fill light (back light @ 3/4 power, fill @ 1/2) just to make sure I got that white background.

This produced some ok results, but because the light had to be just right of centre it introduced an uneven look to the shot with some slightly darker shadows on the left of Nic and Lilly's faces on brighter highlights and the right (relative to the camera).

To remedy this I moved my fill light to centre over the two of them rotated it so it was now horizontally oriented and above them and upped the fill light a little to about 2/3 of a stop less than the backlight.

This produced much smoother, softer results; results I was really happy with!

 So with the lighting set-up sorted it was time to grab a few different looks (and later in post some different treatments).






As usual Lilly hammed it up for the camera and that gave me the pick of the lot:

The pick of the lot: ISO100, 1/200s, f/32 @ 70mm

And here is the sketch of the set-up. As I said, simplicity was the aim!

The set up. Backlight (1x1m softbox) @ 3/4 power and fill light
(1x0.6m softbox) @ 2/3 stop less than the backlight 


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Thanks for reading!!!

Will

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