Photography & Lighting setups
From the category archives:
Trying to control light in my small studio is something I wrestle with all the time. With white walls close in and a white cyc light usually bounce around everywhere if you don’t stop it.
In the studio, we have large bookends to block light, but I felt we needed something flexible that won’t take up so much floor space.
Recently I took some portraits for a guy wanting to try his luck as a male model, click here for the result from the outdoor portrait session on a cloudy day.
Before that we started in the studio with a very simple lighting setup. Just one Profoto D1 250 Air and a gridded Magnum reflector, and a bookend. On white background. No retouching, just him.
When a Swedish publishing house needed portraits of an illustrator named Jessica they called me, and I started thinking about how to light her. After some research on the net, I decided to use a very open and up-against-the-wall type of setup. Almost no shadows, or gradients or anything like that.
A gridded white Profoto Softlight Reflector and a 5 foot Softbox Octa, and a silver reflector. And a camera. And Jessica.
This is a business portrait from the final session the day I used almost the same lighting setup for three different clients with just the addition of one more light for every new “model”.
It started with the one light setup with a test model (a friend with a skate board), which resulted in these portraits of a Swedish singer.
Later the same day, I shot some business portraits using two lights, and last, the portrait above with a third light used as fill light. Just a little, to make the texture in his face become more visible, and the shadows more open.
This business portrait is a simple development of the one light Magnum portrait (click link for behind the scenes photos and more) I shot earlier the same day as a test. It uses the same key/main light as before, a Profoto D1 250 Air with a gridded Profoto Magnum reflector from above through a large Chimera panel with diffusion fabric.
I just added another D1 in a medium sized softbox (2×3 feet or 60×90 cm) placed near the background half way behind the bookend so the effective size of the light is more of a strip softbox.
