Sunday, February 12, 2012

#5 - 52 Weeks Lit Up

So no doubt you would have worked out that there was no post for last week. Unfortunately the realities of fatherhood, owning a house (and having to work on said house) and full time work simply didn't give me enough time to shoot and write up #5.

However, all that means is you get two this week!

First up is an attempt to replicate the effect of soft, overhead lighting that is pretty popular in the glamour/portrait world. Unfortunately I don't yet have a stand and boom which would of course make this far easier, so instead I had to play around with what I have...

My hypothesis was pretty simple: two strobes, as high up on their stands as they can go pointing directly up into umbrella reflectors either side of the subject (me, just for something different!). This produced ok results, but for mine the lighting was a bit flat and lacked any real punch or drama.

The problem was that I had both lights slightly infront of me meaning there was plenty of overlap and spill stripping any shape from the image.

The remedy? Bring the lights more in-line with me to add more shape to the light and minimise the overlap. It didn't take much, the lights were only moved about 30cm toward me (away from the camera) and this created a better result.

Better, but still flat

Still, it wasn't where I wanted it to be and at this stage I was starting to realise that I would have a hard time of achieving what I had in my mind without a boom. Realising this, my priorities changed to now at least creating a shot with more character whilst sticking as closely as possible to the original idea.

It was pretty simple from here on, just keep moving those lights further and further back to bring more shape and direction into the shot until I eventually found a good compromise.

It was at this point that Nic happened to walk past (you'd think she would have learnt by now!) so I roped her in for a couple of shots, one of which is my pick of the bunch...





The pick of the bunch (romantic I know!) ISO 100, 1/200s, f/18 @75mm


The final details are pretty simple:

Both strobes were pointing directly up on half power and about 0.5m from us.


At the end of it all I did have some images that I was happy with, but they still didn't satisfy what I originally wanted. It'll be a while before I upgrade any of my lighting gear so I'm still going to be searching for a technique to replicate a softbox on a boom and just now one thought is to change the umbrellas to reflectors, really ramp up the output and bounce the light off the ceiling... Maybe next time?

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Thanks for reading!!!

Will

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