There are many ways to light the scene. I prefer using more light sources but not all of us are lucky enough to have a couple strobes. This setup will work with 1 key light only and selfmade reflector. Let's share the informations needed to do a studio portrait lighting.
With artificial light it's not necessary to imitate daylight and reach the "natural" daylight effect. I like to experiment and play with it. I decided to take a simple headshot with flying hairs that would be a bit blurred. My starting idea was clear. Image should end up black and white which always means you have to reach a good light to make it look good in a grayscale. Unfortunately there is a huge disadvantage of artificial lighting which is contrast loss when using a softboxes. When I started taking pictures, I had only two huge softboxes and after some time I got really bored by a flat results. I started peeling of softening layers to get more contrasty look. Right now I am pretty much happy with beauty dish which gives the light a bit softened but still very contrast. I use anything to reach the light I like.Here is the final result
For photographers that are broke this tutorial is mainly based on 1 beauty dish (not very expensive on ebay) and one selfmade reflector. It will take you like 20minutes to make it. You can do beautydish by yourself as well but I think it´s that cheap so it´s easier to order it.
How did I reach blurred hair? Well, there were few things which helped me. At first it was the shutter speed which was 1/160sec - clearly it's not fast enough to freeze all the motion. The second aspect was low F (F4-5) and short distance from the lovely model Markéta. I used 24-70mm lens, mostly on maximum focal lenght. This was the reason which gave me a short DOF. So here are two major reasons why hair was blured while face was sharp and clear. It was pretty muh about catching the right moment.Why did I want the hair blurred? Again very clear answer. Most of you people are limited with strobes syncing. Hardly you can get above 1/200 without TTL or expensive strobes or without investing some money to recent strobes. I decided to take it as a challenge and turn it to an advantage.Now about lighting. I started with my favorite 22" beautydish from top (with difuser on) and reflector bouncing the light from bottom. Once I was satisfied, I added a background reflector to turn gray background lighter and divide the model and the background. Then I pointed one more light directly into model´s hair from rear to help them shine. Finaly I added one more reflector above the first one (bouncing the beauty dish) to bring even more light to cheeks and chin and get even better and sharper catchlights in models eyes. Sounds complicated, right? See the picture.
Okay, I guess the scene "sketch" is too cruel so here are few backstage images :-D
This is unedited test image with only beauty dish and 1 big reflector bouncing the light and model´s special expression
And this is image of whole set of lights and reflectors just without a wind and with a little more serious expression :-). Now you can see the difference.
So here is the setup again. Major light is difused beautydish and reflector. All the other lights are not really necessary but if you have them, it's good to use them to spice up the scene. Every light in dark hair gives an image extra plasticity which is very important when turning your images black and white. The only thing which is not really seen is my beloved Ondrej waving with a carton to make Markéta´s hair fly in the air (oh yes, manual job, idea stolen from backstage video of Karl Lagerfeld shooting Pirelli calendar).
Here you can see several images from the set without retouch
The better source you take, the less work you have with retouching and the better it looks. This is the most important rule to keep. Some photographers takes an average photos and expect retouchers to turn it to top quality images. This is not the way it works. Retouch is here just to clean up details, not to rebuild whole image (not in case of photomanipulations of course). If you are not experienced with photoediting, the more important it is to try to reach the best possible result from environment, model, light and yourself before you get to the computer and start downloading an images.
Next time we will talk about retouching :-)Lucie Kout
Super článek! Těším se na další.
Could you please give some more information about how and why you had the second reflector, it's not all that clear in the setup shots just how it's placed and what it's doing that the big reflector isn't doing ??
Thanks again,
Austen.