I was actually intending to be a fly on the wall this week, whilst those wanting studio practice got on with things. A little bit of reportage of amateur photographers was what I intended but it didn’t quite work out that way.
Having said all that it was a useful exercise in reminding me about the control needed to get the kind of lighting you want, in order to achieve a specific kind of effect.
Starting with Marcus we had a two light setup which, if we used one as the key light and one as the fill light initially left us with an interesting picture of the subject but with quite heavy shadows. The camera was set to F11 1/125 ISO 100. A third light would have been useful for lighting the background and getting a whiter backdrop.
The following images were created using a key light with a honeycomb filter and a fill light with soft box.
Using the honeycomb spot as key light the image shows strong shadows. To create this effect we moved the light close to the subject and the subject close to the background
To soften the shadows we tried turning up the power of the fill light; soft box. The image also shows that the key light is too strong
His personal makeup artist acts as a natural diffuser of the key light
By moving the lights further away from the background and more onto the subject, the background becomes darker
By putting a diffuser over both light sources the light across the face becomes more even
By moving the subject closer to the background and directing light onto the background we achieved a whiter backdrop. By holding a reflector below the subject and reflecting light back onto the face the shadows under the chin are reduced
