Portrait lighting experiments lesson one. Broad lighting is a good place to start off with when you're new to portrait work. By broad lighting I mean the main light should be coming in from the same side of the model's face as the most prominent ear you can see from your camera position.Here, Trevor and myself are using YeoPhotoGroup's new studio for the very first time and immediately found ourselves on a steep learning curve of real-life lighting arrangements. You have to remember that until now we've never had the room, or the time, to setup and alter the lights around quite as much as this. This first image is probably only about ten minutes into a ninety minute session and proves that lighting skills is a little like riding a bike, you never forget how it's done.
To off start with we sorted out the white balance as these lights are absolutely ancient, (30 years plus), and haven't been used for twenty years. Next we explored the possibilities of using a shutter speed which could include some of the window light, but as this revealed a ridiculously low 2 seconds we chose to ignore daylight altogether and settled on a pretty standard 1/200th of a second. The ISO is at 100 and an aperture of f14 was settled on.
YeoPhotoGroup is all about doing every thing on a shoe-string budget and these old lights have no power controls, although they do both have built in slave units. Of course there is the old fashioned 'power modifiers' of altering the flash to subject distance, either a shoot-through brolly or a bounce brolly which allowed us to retain some degree of control over flash output.
We decided that a reflector would help light the darker side of my face so a smooth white emulsioned board was held about 12 to16 inches off to camera left. Also, the fairly sharp shadows created by the full-on studio heads with built-in reflectors needed rectifying.
For the second image we added an old faded white shoot-through brolly at two feet from brolly tip to my face, which softened the shadows beautifully. (I must remember to remove that string from my glasses next time.)An Edison screw mini flash, which has its own slave unit built in, became our hair light and was positioned about three feet behind me. In some situations it can help to use a pocket hanky as a method of light reduction - one layer equals one stop and two layers equals two stop.
A second ancient studio flash is lighting the background from tight in to one side of the textured blue sheet and low down, creating a graduated tone behind me, (keep this to the same side as the nose for best results).
The reflector was held a little higher and angled downwards to help reduce glare in my glasses, (see third picture). As the reflected light wasn't quite strong enough we angled the brolly so it aimed halfway between me and the white board.
The complete lighting setup is shown here revealing just how small a space can be used to produce perfectly acceptable portraits.The high voltage flashes were fired by Trevors 550EX canon flash set on 1/125th power and pointing up at the grey ceiling. I did once blank my Canon by firing these monstrous studio heads direct off the camera contacts. Since then I've got hold of a radio studio head trigger for £42 from PhotoDeals UK.
All in all a brilliant evening's work with many lesson learnt. We even had time for some outdoor flash merged with daylight the results of which will be coming up in a later post.
