A friend and fellow photographer and I were sitting and having some overpriced coffee when he asked me a question about one of my shots that we were looking at. “Why did you light it that way?”

It took me a bit by surprise because most of the time I am asked “how” not why. I mentioned a post at Flickr I had made earlier about asking why instead of how, but he insists he doesn’t do forum stuff on the internet (and I believe him) so it was unrelated.

And I was off guard.

The shot was one I posted a while back and I had to make some decisions about how to do it and what tools I would use to do it. It is a shot of Briana taken on the Mexico trip and with the look of a candid.

I had nearly anything I would have wanted at my disposal… great house for a set, studio lights, soft boxes.. you name it.

But I wanted the shot to look natural and without the ‘hand of the photographer’ in the image.

Bri is wearing a teeshirt and boy-shorts and it was very late at night so there was no sun ambient present. I wanted to create a shot where the light helped define the mood, so I had to bring it all or shoot at 1/8 at ISO 1600… Nope. That doesn’t work for me for this shot.

The background is the kitchen area and I wanted it to look bright – as though it had its own illumination and that light was more powerful than the area Bri is looking into. I am using the bright back light as a background, a base so to speak, for Bri to be over. Figure ground sort of thing.

That meant that I had to keep my light in front to a lesser amount so that it would seem as though she were looking into a space from a space… and those spaces were not equal.

They were different. Different illumination values mean different spaces. By bringing her to the edge of the cabinet I was able to use the pillar to help the definition along as well. The strong backlight plays well along the edges of the architecture and Bri as well. See the hairlight and small amount of separation on her left side.

This is the full shot. I love the graininess that the ISO 800 gave me, but I did temper it a bit in Photoshop. Other than some minor skin repair, there is no manipulation of the image.

Briana takes a break at the beach house in Mexico

To keep the light natural, I kept it high as that is where kitchen lighting would be normally. You can see how it falls on her shoulders, hair and back and then falls to almost nothing on her thighs. That helps define the light as coming from above because light from above could not backlight her legs.

The light from the front could not be flat however as that would lose the feeling of ambient. It had to have shape to it.. some light/dark. Notice how her legs go dark toward the back… only to be presented with that bright back light and the definition that dark/light can cause.

Using the wrong tools could have caused the light to overly wrap there and lose the immediacy of the image. It looks very accessible this shot… like a snapshot of a pretty girl drinking her hot tea with a ton of sugar and milk… Heh.

I needed shadows to the front light. Natural looking shadows that would say “light source here” but not say “strobe’ or worse – “flash fill”. That meant a source that would create a soft, but directional light from the front. It allows shadows to be cast, and a definite direction to the light, but not a harsh or overly powerful light source that would remove the intimacy I wanted.

Intimacy is the essence of this shot. Intimate in location, pose, direction, gesture and light.

That’s why I lit it that way.

Did all of that happen with those exact thought patterns as discussed above? Yep… but they flood in, not methodically trickle… but a flood of understanding light and psychology of the shot I wanted and more. A flood of past images and current images, of the space and the model and the light and the feeling I wanted to get.

Intimacy is the reason for this light.

How it was done:

There is a speedlight on a stand behind Bri and to camera right. It is about 7feet in the air and pointed nearly straight up. It is set at 1/16th power. To the front of Briana is a 60″ satin white umbrella in the bounce position (I rarely use shoot thru’s). I have a speedlight in that umbrella set at 1/32 power. It has the zoom pulled way back to 24mm and was giving me a pretty nice soft, but directional light. I shot at ISO 800 and the lighting is approximately 1:2.3 – a stop and a third over the main on the back light.

NOTE: This article is a repost from a Flickr forum posted the same day, but earlier, of this posting.

See you next time at Lighting Essentials.

SHARE/SAVE

The beauty dish was used as a background. I wanted a big flare thing going… it was what I was seeing in my head and I thought that the big black hat could really be cool for that.

I always see an image before I start to light it. When Briana and I were trying to figure out what we were going to do with the black hat I saw the light come through her hair. That triggered an idea for having a lot of light ‘flaring’ around her. I knew the umbrella wouldn’t work, but the beauty dish may.

We placed the beauty dish off to one side a bit to get the flare on only that side. Both lights have the same power and the beauty dish was aimed right at the camera. Flare? Oh, yeah… we got some flare going then. Here is another shot from the series:

Here is a setup shot showing the placement of the umbrella and the beauty dish:

Information for today’s photographer. From novice to pro, LE Magazine has it all.

This side shot shows the distances of the lights. Keep in mind that it is shot with a wide angle lens so the items seem a little more distant than they actually were. When the beauty dish popped, Briana could feel the heat on her back… it is pretty close.

I shot with both my 100MM 2.8 and the 80-200mm 2.8L zoom. Interestingly I got a lot less flare from the beauty dish on the 100MM than on the 80-200. It may be due to age, the zoom is an older model, but it was definitely very noticeable on the screen.

You can see the ‘flag’ to keep a little bit of light off the background. It was getting so much spill light that it was going to bright. I wanted it just a little toward the light gray. Placing that large card did give me enough to make that side of the image a little gray, allowing the bright side to seem so much brighter.

Here is a snapshot of the Photoshop technique I used for the main shot. I will be doing some more Photoshop tutorials, with movies and work files. Watch this site and the magazine site for more information.

Part Three
Part Two
Part One

SHARE/SAVE

The single umbrella has always done well for me in these situations. I use a big 54″ white umbrella with black backing to mitigate spill. In this one umbrella I used a 200 WS strobe so I could get a very large aperture. Limited depth-of-field is the look I was going for, so the images would have a more ‘immediate” or casual look.

The seamless was angled toward the light to make sure I got as much as I could without fall-off. The boom held a bright shiny card angled to bounce light down on the models and there was a small, white reflector angled slightly up at the model on her left. It and the umbrella were very, very close for maximum softness. Look into her eyes and you will see both.

I also placed a 4×8 sheet of white board on the ground to work on. This kept the dark carpet from adding unwanted shadows under the chin, nose and eyes. See the diagram below.

Post-processing included a bit of lightening of the white background, some careful skin retouching and Skin FX plug in for Photoshop which gave the women a glamour look without destroying the sharpness of the hair styles. Sorry, no setup shot on this one.

Information for today’s photographer. From novice to pro, LE Magazine has it all.

SHARE/SAVE

This shot of Lynne is created with three lights. Two of them are providing backlight and one is providing the front, or main light. It is a simple setup, one that can be done with studio or speedlights with consistent results.

I am using very small matching umbrellas here. they are 22″ soft white umbrellas and are about two feet from Lynne. They are matched for height and angle as well as distance. I wanted the light to be even across the back.

For this shot they are mounted on medium Bogen stands, and angled down at about 30% to have a little top feel to the light. They are about 20 inches above her (bottom of umbrella to head).

The front light is a beauty dish, this one is my old Norman dish which I love. I may buy a new one to have a matched pair, but this thing is really so fun, showing 20 years of dings, tape, marks and all kinds of ‘work’ marks. I have it about 3 feet from Lynne and slightly above the camera (10 inches or so). In this case, it is well between the lens and Lynne, so I am shooting under it. It is mounted on a Bogen Boom arm to keep the stands out of my way.

The power to all lights are equal. The meter gives me f8 from the front light, f8 from each of the backlights. The way I meter is to take a reading from the front light blocking the side light from any contamination of the pure reading (in this case not a big problem cause the backlights are behind her). I then take a reading of the backlights as it falls on the model. In other words, I turn my Minolta Flash Meter toward them and measure the light falling on her as though they were main lights. I will take a final reading from the subject toward the lens with all flashes firing to make sure I am not getting anything I was not expecting.

All of these lights are now giving me f8 and that means they are even. So why does the backlight work to show the light. It is because they are hitting Lynne at an angle and her skin and dress start to catch the light and reflect it toward the camera. Do you see how it highlights her neck and chin from the edge forward? That edge is catching the backlight at an angle to throw it right into the lens. It seems brighter, and essentially it is.

Remember also that my main light is only 3ft from her, so it is already falling off as it clears her shoulders. The backlight is catching the receding light and kicking it back up.

The dark area under her right cheek is from the natural area caused from her hair blocking the backlight, the contrast is because the main light (and only light seen in this area) is the beauty dish. Beauty dishes have a bit more contrast and less ‘wrap’ than umbrellas.

The lens I am using here is the 100mm, f2.8 Canon USM. I love this lens for its sharpness and blazing fast focus. In the studio I will more than likely have this lens or my Canon 80-200MM L Zoom (yes, 80-200mmL – it is an older model.)

I am also using a compendium lens shade to keep any flare off of the lens. A compendium hood looks like the bellows of a view camera. I think they are the most consistently reliable flare protection, and it folds flat for easy stowing in my already overloaded bag.

You will also notice in the lighting diagram that I am using a shiny board under her chin. It is adding some kick up, but I have it lower than normal so that it doesn’t wipe out the contrast of the beauty dish. We used to finesse these things with Polaroid (RIP), but today I will shoot tethered whenever I can, or rely on the zoom tool on the camera LCD screen to see the subtle changes. I don’t have that much faith in the screen on the back of the camera for exposure and such, so I use this only when I cannot see it on my laptop. I have found that the contrast on that little screen is far more than what is rendered in the capture.

I shot the image in Raw and processed it normally. This image has been Photoshopped to include some skin retouching, a Curves adjustment for a little added contrast and a softness filter applied at 50%. I also slightly burned in the texture on the lighter part of the dress… 10% or so.

Information for today’s photographer. From novice to pro, LEMagazine has it all.

To do this shot with speedlights would be very easy. I would recommend the use of a smaller beauty dish from the front, or possibly a small softbox. The back, side lights could remain small umbrellas. I would make sure that the fill cards were very tight to compensate for the somewhat smaller throw of the speedlights in umbrellas. Many photographers are adding additional speedlights to their aresenal, and I recommend that as well. Modern flashes are quite expensive with all the ETTL and other technology built in. For a shot like this you don’t need that, so older, manual flashes could be used. Ebay or Craigslist could net you a great find. A friend of mine picked up 2 Nikon SB600′s for $120 off Craigslist… so be diligent. I believe you can still get the Vivitar 285HV for under a hundred bucks at Amazon, at least at the time of this writing.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If there is something special you would like to see, please contact me by email from the contact page.

SHARE/SAVE

Umbrellas are a staple of the lighting arsenal. You can certainly see them in use more and more as they regain some respect after the decades of SoftBox as king. I love umbrellas and have quite an assortment of them.

Umbrellas come in different sizes, reflectivity and abilities. I think a variety would be something to consider and adding one or two at a time can add significant diversity to your light sources.

Silver Umbrellas are very bright. The light is contrasty and the efficiency is quite high. I am not fond of the way silver umbrellas create very bright highlights on faces, but they work well for lighting interiors and backgrounds. You should test your silver umbrellas against a white umbrella to see the difference in highlights.

White Umbrellas are the softest. They come in flat white and ‘satin’. The satin white umbrellas have a little more ‘pop’ than the flat white, but are still quite soft in the highlights. I like large, satin umbrellas for main lights. The highlights are soft and the contrast is easily managed. (See a wide variety of umbrellas at Calumet)

Mixed Umbrellas: Silver/White, Gold/Silver. These umbrellas, sometimes called ‘Zebras’, are kind of mashups to give a photographer another light source. Obviously a zebra silver/white is more contrasty than white, but less contrasty than silver. The silver/gold adds a little warmth with a very bright light.

Shoot-Through Umbrellas are turned around so the light is shooting ‘thru’ the umbrella. this use of the umbrella is quite popular, and requires a white umbrella with no black backing. I recommend black backs that can be removed. Then you have both, a shoot thru and a bounce umbrella.

There are other umbrellas like “softlighters” and such, but we are looking only at the basic umbrellas on this tutorial.

A good assortment for a portrait shooter using studio strobes would be 1 large white or satin, 2 matching mediums white or satin, a medium silver or zebra and one small satin or silver for accents. If you are a commercial shooter who will be lighting rooms or backgrounds, your kit mav vary and lean more toward medium and large silver or zebra umbrellas.

I use fome core for my bounce cards in the studio. I also have shiny boards and a wide assortment of those fold up bounce tools for use when I need them. I have white and black (for negative light), silver, gold and satin. One sheet of fome core is very inexpensive and can be cut into several shapes of bounce cards. (See framing shops and art supply stores for fome core.)

Here are some stills showing the ways the light works when using an umbrella.

Side by Side for comparison.

Single Umbrella slightly to the side

Single Umbrella more to the front of model

Single Umbrella at a distance

Shoot Through, No Fill

Shoot Through, With Fill

Bounce Umbrella, With Fill

ASSIGNMENTS:

Technical: Take your own umbrella shots to compare how the use of distance, height and size matters on a face of your choosing. Then add a fill card (fomecore or cardboard or professional bounce board) Move it in close and take it out… Make a little comparison chart to see the effect of the different umbrella placement.

Artistic: One umbrella and one face. Shoot a one umbrella portrait of someone and create as much drama as you can.

We will have a fun critique and mentoring site up soon. Watch for the announcement on the home page.

Information for today’s photographer. From novice to pro, LEMagazine has it all.

SHARE/SAVE

We also wanted to do a very soft, sexy headshot. For that I used a Strip light horizontally and set it within a tunnel of fill. Bright card for bottom fill and side fill cards to brighten the face from all sides. I also used a ‘zebra’ umbrella for the hair light and kept the ratio 1:1 for most of the shots.

This is a Legacy Lighting Essentials Page, clicking on HOME will bring you back to the home page.

SHARE/SAVE

These shots were all created with one light. We used an umbrella and a 4 foot ‘Strip Light” for the light. We also used lots of Fill Cards. In the video I show some metering techniques that I use to previsualize the light on the model.

Visit this older Lighting Essentials page HERE. Clicking Home will bring you back to the home page.

SHARE/SAVE

The shoot was a lot of fun and you can see how many ways that these simple tools can be used to make images that are unique from each other, with only a tweak to the lighting.

This is an older Lighting Essential “Mini Workshop” page and the Home button will bring you right back here.

Click Here to View

SHARE/SAVE

I keep the umbrella as low as possible and if I raised the camera an inch you would see the bottom of the umbrella.

In this shot, we simply removed the fill card and let the shadows go under the chin and nose. It is a bit more dramatic, but with a face like this it is simply amazing.

This light is not condusive to every face, for instance if there are lots of blemishes. It would not be a good choice for heavy people or those with lots of lines their faces. The increased contrast would bring out the wrinkles and lines instead of diminishing them with the fill card.

Below is the Diagram for doing the lighting yourself. The squares are 1foot and the set is very close to scale.

SHARE/SAVE

The single umbrella has always done well for me in these situations. I use a big 54″ white umbrella with black backing to mitigate spill. In this one umbrella I used a 200 WS strobe so I could get a very large aperture. Limited depth-of-field is the look I was going for, so the images would have a more ‘immediate” or casual look.

The seamless was angled toward the light to make sure I got as much as I could without fall-off. The boom held a bright shiny card angled to bounce light down on the models and there was a small, white reflector angled slightly up at the model on her left. It and the umbrella were very, very close for maximum softness. Look into her eyes and you will see both.

I also placed a 4×8 sheet of white board on the ground to work on. This kept the dark carpet from adding unwanted shadows under the chin, nose and eyes.

Post-processing included a bit of lightening of the white background, some careful skin retouching and Skin FX plug in for Photoshop which gave the women a glamour look without destroying the sharpness of the hair styles. Sorry, no setup shot on this one.

SHARE/SAVE