Lighten Up Thursday
Coming up with quick lighting setups are hard to do on the spot especially with a paying client at hand. I don't suggest ever testing something out with a paying client, this can definitely break you if you do fail. This is why as a professional, we practice; but practicing on awesome models, that's even better. Going back to the previous post, I figured I would pull this one and give the break down on how we set it up and how simple it was.
So here is the quick set up on the above image. After shooting picture right above this one, we turned around and saw this wall with these awesome grooves in it. We liked and wanted to try to use it for the texture. The first thought would have been to stick the model right up against it wall and try a shoot, but what we would have come up with would have been light spill all over the background (nasty).
(the below diagram is what it looked like)
- So I pulled the model about 5 feet off the wall so that we could get a decent background blur.
- With our softbox situated right in front of our model about 2 feet away, chin high and angled at a 45 degrees we are able to keep additional light spill at a minimum.
- because I didn't have my light meter right at hand, i started off with the lowest power on the strobe and worked my way up till I liked it. This shot was about the 2nd or 3rd shot which put us at 1/16th power.
- Now that we have the model looking amazing, we have a background that is pretty dark. Keeping in mind that the grooved wall was what attracted us to this spot, we decided to highlight it with off camera flash (canon 550ex) zoomed all the way out to 103mm. This keeps the light focused as if a snoot was used. The light skims the raised parts of the wall giving this golden rain looking effect in the back.
*keep in mind I'm not looking for things that are technically right, but look and flatter my clients and are super quick and easy to do.
(What we used)
settings (ISO 200, F9, 1/200th, 66mm)
Go out and practice this so you can throw down some awesomeness and wow your clients when you show them the back of your camera. The will be amazed!
