When I take portraits outside in sunlight I try as much as I can (but not always, of course) to have the model with the sun in her back, just to avoid harsh shadows from strong sunlight. With his/her back to the sunlight, you often also get the benefit of free hair light and rim light, that separates your model a bit from the background. Even if you shoot with a short DOF, it is nice to have that. I think.
I have been a happy Profoto user a couple of years now, and it feels I am just getting the hang of it, trying to use different light modifiers for different results (and trying to master some of their products, not buying every modifier in their catalog, even if it is very tempting).
Apart from just looking at other photographers images, I learn a lot from studying studio lighting setup diagrams (and trying to do a lot of them myself as well), and watching lighting video guides when I have the time (and patience, some of them are very diluted and far from easy to understand).
Profoto did a series of short movies when they released their new monobloc series, D1 (250, 500, 1000 + Air), some time ago. In my opinion, they are exactly as I want video guides to be. Short, informative and with the very good narrator and photographer Tony Corbell. And they really makes me want to buy a couple.
Here are four different videos, each explaining one setup, together with the resulting images (it seems they haven’t done any retouching at all, which is good in many ways I think).
When shooting a portrait session for the ad campaign I mentioned earlier on this blog, the 4-light clamshell portraits in black and white, I tried to reduce the setup to the bare minimum required to get a good portrait.
Recently I shoot a couple of studio portraits for some ads, the client was a temp agency focused mainly on recruitment and staffing companies in the finance and banking sector. My assignment was to use their staff as models and create seven different photos all communicating the same thing – this might be the big company hotshots of tomorrow.
Recently I had the honor of photographing a very talented Swedish comic book artist named Kim W Andersson. Maybe not a worldwide celebrity, but well known in comic book circles. My assignment was to produce some studio portraits for the book publisher he is working for on an upcoming book. And this is how I did it.
