One of our friends decided to put together a photoshoot and invited me to participate. It was a great experience, the model was gorgeous and I had a chance to show the lighting-on-the-cheap way of shooting.
For the shoot, I brought the barest minimum which consisted of two lightweight lightstands, one small umbrella, my medium-sized DIY lightpanel and two small strobes (Sunpak 383 and SB-27). The kit fitted in a small baseball bat bag.
Angie, our all-smiling model. Note the panel in the background.
Setup 1
This setup was not done by my cheapo stuff. The light comes from the modeling lamp of a single Profoto beauty dish. All the other lights were ambient. I shot this at ISO 1600 while my friends were using the strobes. The background was gray paper. I added some texture in post just 'cause...
Setup 2
Medium lightpanel on camera left about 1 meter away from the model. I had one voice-operated stand holding the SB-27 on camera right, slightly behind the model to provide the rim light on the model's face. I also had another voice-operated stand with a frosted silver bounce card (car sunscreen) on camera right to soften the shadow side.
Post
I cross-processed the final shots through NIK ColorEfex
Nice work - I particularly like the last image. I realize that the second is impromptu, but you committed the classic "unusual head growth" error.
ReplyDeleteHey John, you need to explain to me that one. I'm not sure what you meant. Does the head look disproportionate?
ReplyDeleteSorry. Bad joke - I was referring to the light stand(?) or grip or appearing neatly behind the crown of her head in the second shot. Like the tree growing out of Aunt Minnie's head in the photo from the family picnic.
ReplyDeleteThe NikColorEfex crossprocessing --- is that a particular, built-in filter? Any idea how it maps colors? Your shots don't look like wet-chemical cross processing, but I like the effect.
ReplyDeleteJohn: it is indeed a filter made by NIK, part of their ColorEfex plug-in for Photoshop. That said, it's actually pretty easy to replicate straight within Photoshop, just not as convenient. Adobe Photoshop CS3 For Photographer by Martin Evening has a two-pages section on it.
ReplyDeleteThe basis is to bleach out the skin tone and slightly change its hue then add a tint to the shadow. It's mostly done with the Curve adjustment in Color blend mode.
I may write a tutorial about it at a later time.
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ReplyDeleteglamour photography