About technique and more.

Try something simple for once….. or twice

A lot of people always complicate light setups, if we bought we 4 lights we better use 4 otherwise the “wife” will be angry “why did you buy 4 if you only use 1” right?
However sometimes simple can be so much more spectacular.
Today two images with an incredibly simple light setup.

 

I used one Elinchrom head with the standard reflector and a grid.
Now most books, videos, workshops (including my own) start with the tip to get the light OFF CAMERA, well yeah that’s true… however that doesn’t mean that sometimes it’s very cool to shoot in the same direction as the light. In this case the light is of course OFF CAMERA, for the very simple reason that you “can’t” mount a studio strobe on your hotshoe (although I’m sure somewhere on ebay you will find an adaptor), but for this setup it’s actually just a little bit above my camera, so I’m shooting almost with on camera flash (only it’s placed about 40-50cm above the camera).

 

As you can see there is nothing wrong with the effect, it’s actually pretty cool.
The background is also very simple, it’s just wallpaper, we have several movable walls in our studio that are covered with wallpaper, we need app 2 rolls per wall so it’s very cheap and easy to change wallpapers if I’m bored with them.

nadine dec 27 201317646-Edit

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Three portraits

During a session (for me) it’s very important to capture something that is “unique” although I know that everything has already been done at least once or twice (probably more) I still try to steer away from the “standard” beauty shot, and don’t get me wrong… there is nothing wrong with a beauty shot but for me… well it’s a bit “boring” to do myself.

 

So how do you approach something like this.
I always try to get something from my model, it can be a very subtle expression or something more.
In the following shot I went for the more relaxed expression.
Just let the model look away and let her think of someone that is coming over the hill, the fun part is that every model will give you a different expression.

Susanna December 20 2013-4-Edit

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Blowing out

We all know the white backgrounds, but to be honest I think they have had their longest time.
Now a days for example I just love the light grey backgrounds a lot more… we still use a white background for this but we just don’t light it, creating a very nice modern look. However if you still want to play with white why not try the following.

 

Normally we meter the model incident and add 2.5-3 stops to the background (metered reflective) to create a really nice white background without blowing out details like hair.
In the following shots I did something else, and I really like this technique. Instead of using a strobe as main light I just use the strobes on the white background and meter towards the camera (incident) to get a “correct” exposure on the face of the model. The main light source in this case is in fact the whole studio, or in other words all the light that scattered around the studio and reaches the model from the front. This will result in a very blown out background really wrapping around our model as you can see here :

Manon November 22 2013-92-EditNow if the effect is a bit too strong you can always lower the exposure a bit on the the model or move the model further away from the background.

 

This technique also works very nice for portraits, but watch out with models with really light blond hair 🙂

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One background… many options

During one of the workshops we decided it would be interesting to see what you can actually do with one background.
The only thing we changed was the light and the retouching process.
So the next time you think that you don’t know what to do with your backgrounds anymore… think about this post and start experimenting with the position of light, retouching etc.
I do have to add that we choose the pink background because this is a very strong color and actually much harder to “cover up” than for example gray or white.

Lenaa_-617-Edit

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