I was going to call this post something like “and ace up your sleeve” but yeah, it’s a shot involving cards that I thought would make a good behind the scenes post.

Lighting plays a key role in determining the mood of a photo such as this so that’s the first thing to sort out before the shoot begins.

To give a contrasty yet flattering look I decided to go for a strong directional yet soft light for the model. The background was hit with a spotlight on the curtain - to compliment the theatrical setting. Read the full post for more details setting up lighting in two planes:

Here’s a photo of the setup (click it for the large version). The main light is a softbox on the left side, and the spot light effect is achieved by a second flashhead with a snoot, which is an tapered tube which limits the spread of the light to a small circle.

Joe McNally says something like “the hardest thing about lighting is not lighting”. This is a perfect example of where that applies - despite the fact the axis of the light was parallel with the background some of the light was still spilling onto the curtains destroying the spotlight effect.

I fixed this by putting a gobo (go between) on the left side of the softbox to block this light. In this case my gobo consisted of a coat on a lightstand (a flag or black card would have been better, but you use what you have).

Using the flash modelling light (a regular incandescent bulb that sits next to the flash tube, giving you a live preview) it’s easy to move the gobo until it shades the correct area. If you’re using a hotshoe flash with no modelling light the same can be achieved using line-of-sight and a few quick test shots:

On the left only the main is on, and you can see that none of the light is spilling onto the background, likewise on the right only the spotlight is on. A major advantage of this scheme is that the power of the main light and background light can be determined separately knowing that one will not affect the other. I actually did this by taking several shots as different ISOs, picking the one I liked best and then altering the flash power to get back to the actual ISO I wanted to shoot at (200). Note that when I pulled back for a full length the carpet at the bottom is lit by the main light.

The cards weren’t part of the original concept (which was to have the model pose as if she were an old wooden puppet) but since they were there it never hurts to experiment and I really liked the look.

Even with two people throwing cards into the scene it was impossible to get an even spread of cards since you are only capturing a single moment in time. The solution was to shoot a series of card throws at the end and paste in extra cards using Photoshop, a simple job as the background is the same. I also added a little fill light to the right side of Mary’s as it was too dark in the chosen shot. This is something that could have been fixed with a small reflector had I noticed it at the time (it only affected this one shot, so Photoshop to the rescue!)

Here’s the final shot (click for larger)

MG

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Behind the Scenes, Lighting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.