Very often my clients want photos taken in their office, but to make it look a little better, often with a stock photo as some kind of visual reference. Trying to imitate something very polished, sunny and designed, in an ordinary office has its challenges. Especially when the sky outside is covered with dark clouds.
That is exactly what happened to me lately, when shooting portraits for a client. We had just shot the ordinary portraits against a medium grey background in one of their rooms, when they asked if I could take a couple more. If I could use their office as background, they would be delighted.
[Read the full post here…]
Profoto, the makers of the studio lights and light modifiers I use almost daily has a really good blog, with a lot of interesting content.
I have had the honour to be mentioned in their post three times now, the first with a blog post on clothing photography for a Swedish designer, the second from a portrait session with a young model and the latest was when I tried to take good product photos of pills and plastic bottles.
Now they have added even more content with the addition of three lighting videos that I think are really great. Maybe a little too long, and a little too much talk, but the summary when they show the final photo in different stages of lighting together with a lighting diagram, it makes everything really easy to understand. If you are getting bored by the talking, fast forward to the last 20 seconds or so, and there you can find the summary.
Three different lighting setup videos here…
I haven’t used the snoot for portraits in a while, and when a publisher in Stockholm asked me to take some portraits of a writer, I thought it could be a good idea to include it. To create something a little different.
Using the snoot all by itself would maybe have been cool, but not that useful. Maybe if she wrote vintage mystery novels. So, I used it together with a much larger light source from the same direction, a 5 foot Profoto softbox Octa. As something between fill and key light.
Lighting diagram & behind the scenes here…
