Deezie wrote:
This was a test shot for a presentation to a client. The setup shot doesn't show the light, but it's simply a Hensel Beauty dish placed 24 inches above the subject. She's sitting on a towel-covered applebox on a white, seamless b.g. I climbed a rickety old ladder in the pix to get this shot.
Deezie, maybe its off topic, and maybe it's just me, but I thought the set-up shot shows a wonderful expression.
Justin Berman wrote:
Nice setup... I want your gear
More seriously, if you are on the floor with the Hasselblad, and the probig is above you angled down, doesn't that cancel out some of its fill properties?
I understand fill as coming from one of two different places:
1: on camera axis (and maybe the pro big is close enough and big enough spread that it doesnt matter)
2: opposite from the key
Perhaps I should add 3: all around if you wrap the subject with light or are outdoors in shade.
Justin, sorry for the delay... never saw your question until now. This is my first time back to this thread since I posted that image.
To answer your question: Yes and no. The pro big is big enough that it creates its own fill no matter where it's pointed.... in soviet russia, the pro big fills you! It actually was fairly on-axis with the camera - it just doesn't look that way for the same reason that it looks smaller than the 3' octa - perspective. However, I think we dropped it a little lower later on. Also, it's worth pointing out that the the camera was low for a "hero" shot. The large, soft modifiers pretty much negated any change in lighting caused by changes in camera position. (Compare this to a bare head or gridded head - the camera position has a significant role in determining how the subject will appear to be lit). This set-up shot was taken before the subject was out of hair and makeup and we were still tweaking and metering. Good eye!
Oh, and thanks for the compliment... but that gear isn't mine. All rentals baby! I wish I owned all that. I putter around with a couple 5D's, a whole bunch of Dyna heads, and some nice but not spectacular modifiers.
One last thing - can you fix the broken link for the final image of yours above? I'd love to see it. Thanks!
setup was a Canon 580ex at 1/2 power in a 28" Westcott softbox. I like to keep things very simple and easy to break down/setup when on location. Plus, I really love the look that a little softbox can add to an image outside.
hey Sid is there a second light at foot level in those shots? it looks like the westcott is firing directly at your torso but also lighting up the foreground directly in front and below the box. thanks!
That little patch of light was coming from the bottom zippered opening of the softbox. I didn't have it zippered all the way closed, and that little spill was the result.
I DPed a video the other day and we had a 43.5" Mola Mantti and a DynaLite pack as a prop. I had never used the big Mola, so I took a few quick shots of our actress.
Mola Mantti with a Dyna-Lite 4040 head hooked to a Dyna-Lite M1000wi pack and a 4x8' sheet of black & white foam core.
The black Duvetyne curtains are used as sound baffles for video recording. They are also good for controlling light bounce, and they are removable when you do want light bounce. Sorta trick.
Beauty dish almost straight down and in front of model, feathered on to her, gridded 9 inch reflector camera left behind model for rim, gridded 9 inch reflector toward background
Hope you all enjoy!
Please feel free to critique my work, only way i improve my lighting is to see whats wrong.
Lighting was a Profoto Acute2 head with just a zoom reflector (at about position 8) to camera right metered at ~f/8, then another Acute2 head in a 5' octabox above and behind the camera for fill metered at ~f/4.
Lighting was the same 5' octa in the high position of a clamshell with a 24x32" softbox beneath it. Both softbox faces were probably 3-4' away from the model and were metered at f/11 - f/8.
Okay, let's see if we can get this thread resurrected! I'd really love to see other folks' work and hear the stories behind the images. Don't hold back, show us the final images, setup images, tell us how you got there!
Here's one from me from this week.
Monday I had what might have been my worst shoot ever (even trumping a few weeks ago when a Profoto Acute2 pack blew up 10 shots into a shoot!) with the worst makeup artist I've ever worked with. All of my regular folks were booked or unavailable, so I ended up working with someone for the first time - big mistake. It was absolutely painful and mortifying and required multiple phone calls and meetings to apologize to the agency bookers who repped the models in question. I kicked the makeup artist off the shoot and walked her out of the studio mid-afternoon, scrapping half the day's planned setups and leaving one model totally unshot. So, to make up for it (no pun intended), I brought her back on Wednesday to work with one of my regular makeup artists.
Rather than trying to cram a bunch of fashion looks into a casual shoot we opted to do two simple beauty setups instead - one light and one dark, with the idea that they could make facing pages in a portfolio or a diptych. We shot the light look first, with really clean "nude" makeup (always shoot the clean look first!), then moved on to the darker "evening" look.
Basically, you've got three strobe heads on separate packs, two gelled and one gridded, plus a reflector to bounce a little fill back in. The intent was for either one or both of the gelled heads to be in the frame, depending on composition. The red gelled head went in first, then the blue, then the gridded "key light" and reflector last. While initially lighting it felt like f/11 was going to be an output sweet spot, so I continued to light for that after the first head was up.
From shot to shot we made small adjustments, applying more gloss to Sam's lips or product in her hair or spraying water across her chest and shoulders to get a slightly different look.
This is what one of the shots looked like - this is unretouched, right out of camera except for cropping. The final image will get a fair amount of retouching, as most beauty images do.
Total time for this setup was probably: 35 minutes for makeup (built over an earlier makeup look), 25 minutes to build and tweak the lighting, 10-15 minutes of makeup tweaking once under light, 10 minutes of lighting tweaking while shooting, 15 minutes of total shooting. I shot 104 total frames of this look and it was the second of two looks we shot with this model - both looks took 2.5 hours to shoot, including setup and cleanup.
EDIT:
Attached one of the finished and retouched images from the day's first setup, which was the "clean" one, just for comparison.
Lastolite UmbrellaBox with a Bowens Esprit 500 in it, set to about f5.6 (or whatever the exif says), another honeycombed Esprit with a Green gel over it, throwing that spot on the background, hairlight and a reflector to right of the models. Colours then "wrecked" in Photoshop.
abdul10000 wrote:
What color was the backdrop in that shot, gray with a blue tint? If it is savage do you know the exact paper number?
Sorry, but you're off on both counts! It's not paper at all, it's a painted cyc wall, and it's white - Inverse Square is your friend, white can be grey if you want it to be.
It's the same studio and cyc wall as my other posts in this thread, if that's any help.
It's not paper at all, it's a painted cyc wall, and it's white - Inverse Square is your friend, white can be grey if you want it to be.