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Take a glance at this portrait. Not a bad headshot if I say so myself. Now take a guess how I set it up and especially how I lit it. Custom built studio set? Ridiculously expensive ringflash?
You've probably guessed by now that neither of those answers are true. This is the home studio series and we're looking at ways of getting you great shots with minimal lighting gear.
Take a careful look at the background. See those horizontal lines? Yep, that's not a fancy background cloth hung from an expensive support system. That's carpet. Hung from stairs. The enigmatic white stripe on the right is a banister.
OK, that's the location sorted, how about the lighting? To figure out the lighting in portraits, the giveaway is always the eyes.
Biggish light source coming from slightly above eyeline and left of centre and a funny kid of triangular source from below and to the left. There's also a kind of vignette to the whole picture (and no, that wasn't added in post).
This should be enough clues for you to figure it out. If you really want the answer right away then scroll down, but you'll miss the science bit.
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The look
Flick open a fashion magazine and look closely at the pictures. Not the grab shots of celebrities falling out of nightclubs but the carefully set up studio shots. Chances are they feature very flat even lighting. Although most studio photography tries to give a sense of 3d to the picture by the use of light and shade, the trend in fashion photography is to give even light all over and then accent it with very subtle shadows.
There are a couple of good reasons for this. Firstly the soft light makes the model's skin glow. This is very often enhanced in post (and this has been done with the majority of the pictures on this page) but the starting point is to light the face softly and evenly. Secondly you want to avoid any ugly shadows. If you get a dark shadow under somebody's chin then it can look like the have a double chin or are much more heavily built than they are. If you cast a shadow under their nose it can just look ugly.
A final reason is that even lit headshots are somehow more engaging for fashion shots. If you are shooting “art” then you'll want a fair amount of light and shade to give mystery and elegance to the shot. If you are shooting for the cover of a magazine then you'll want something that leaps off the shelves at people in Smiths - you want a high impact evenly lit picture. This is especially true if what you are photographing isn't really the person but their hair or makeup or jewellery.
How the pros do it
Again we'll look at the eyes to give us a clue to the lighting.
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Small, round highlight with a hole in the middle? That's caused by a ringlight. These are great because they are a huge frying pan shaped light with a hole in the middle. You stick your lens through the hole and get light from above, left, right and below. It literally wraps your subject in light.
There's a problem with ringlights - they cost thousands. You can pick up a ring flash for shooting macro subjects relatively cheaply but to get one that is large enough for a head shot or full length you're going to need to raid a very big piggy bank. The cheapest commercially available ring flash for portraits is an Alien Bees ABR800.
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This sells for $400 and people are snapping them up - the alternatives generally cost thousands.
There are plenty of tutorials on the web for how to make your own ringflash - but we're going to do without.
So, pro kit
Background and stand - let's call that £275
Nice chair to sit on - £50
Ringlight - anywhere from £400 (ship an item from America and watch how the dollars magically become punds) to £6,000. Or the usual alternative of renting a studio for about £100.
Let's see if you can cut that down a little.
Here's how we're going to do it
Our kit list
Some stairs (bad news for people in bungalows) - these double as a nice background and somewhere for our model to sit
A reflector (I used a Lastolite Tri-Grip costing£56.50 - you could get by with a sheet of cardboard with crinkled cooking foil on it)
Err, that's it - though you may want to use some of the kit from last week for the really cool vignette trick.
Set up and positioning is everything - there's no real trickery to the camera work this week.
That's pretty much it - there are a couple of things to know about this though. The main trick is that like a lot of houses, the stairs are directly opposite the door. If yours aren't then you might want to use a chair in the hallway instead. The idea is that you shoot this with the front door open and directly behind you. Light streams in from behind and above. This lights the top of the model's face and the walls bounce light into the side of it.
Notice the use a reflector though - that's the absolute key to this shot. Without it the light is horrible since it leaves big shadows under her chin and nose. Here's a shot without the reflector (this also shows the perils of using a wide angle in a small space - the lens makes her thighs look bigger than her head!)
So the simple summary - get or make a silver reflector, position your model in the hallway with the door open and use a reflector to bounce silver light up under her face to fill in the shadows. It's amazing how effective this can be.
I said there were no camera tricks this week, but I thought I'd share the exif information for the top shot with you. This was a dark day. The door opened onto a busy street so rather than open it I left it closed and let the light come through the frosted glass. Shot on a cheap kit lens I couldn't go wider than f4.5 so the settings were 1600 ISO and 1/20s. That was on a Samsung GX10 with anti shake and I'm reasonably good at hand holding. If you find yourself at 1/20s then you really want to think about getting your tripod out.
Bonus trick with the vignette
Actually this isn't a real vignette, it's more a shaft of light.
Here's a slightly wider shot of the setup.
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Notice the doorway on the right? I simply placed a flashgun on a stand inside that room. The flash was positioned reasonably low and directed to cast a shadow up and onto the stairs behind. The door jam and reflector block some of the light and the small flash head I was using has quite a tight beam. This throws a shaft of light right across the picture.
It is mainly lighting up the left hand wall - watch how horrible the picture becomes if my model sits on the opposite side
This is a good example of fill flash. Once I had set the shot up and metered correctly for the daylight and reflector I simply put the flash into position on a relatively low power to add a nice graze of light.
A couple of shots and adjustments and I had the flash setting I wanted. Note that the camera was on manual and my exposure values didn't change once I added the flash. I often think of fill flash as removing dark rather than adding light - as such you need to have it at a power where the main exposure is still correct.
So, £6,000 ringlight or £56.50 home studio. Your choice:
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| Discuss this article, 1 of 15 messages, read more: |  Dave Ebling | |
| Posted: 13/04/07 12:55:36 36 | Now you say that only the shutter speed affects the exposure of the background, and tha tyou shouldn't change it, even when the aperture is adjusted. Surely this is wrong? If you change the aperture and keep the shutter speed the same, the natural light exposure will be affected.
Sure, the shutter speed doesn't affect flash illumination (sync speed aside) but the aperture does affect correct natural light exposure.
I would say experiment with the foreground exposure using the right aperture first. Then adjust the shutter speed to get the right background exposure.
My way of doing this without buying any extra equipment is to use my camera's onboard flash for the foreground lighting, and use my SB-600 flashgun (with it's ... |
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