This past Monday I shot some additional portraits at the office. This time I utilized four different backgrounds: the glass-block wall and the black marble tile on the main floor, along with plain black and plain white backdrops. Each brought their own challenges in terms of lighting, and that’s what I’ll concentrate on here, featuring Barb who is a Partner Channels Manager for Sybase.
It became clear early on that Barb’s photogenic side was her left. I first tried a lighting setup with the main light, a Novatron 500 monolight with large Photoflex softbox, positioned to the right of the camera, powered to f/8.5. I positioned a fill light, another Novatron 500 mono light with a medium-sized softbox, directly behind and above the camera at f/5.6.5. Finally, I positioned a small slave flash on a stand above and behind the subject to act as a hair light.
While I liked the effect – I have used similar setups previously in the same location – as a second attempt I moved the main light to the left of the camera (the subject’s right). This did two things:
- The glass blocks behind took on a more contrasty, shaded look; and, more importantly,
- The light beautifully modelled Barb’s features with the shadowed side of her face now closer to the camera.
I was delighted with that more dramatic result, and stuck with that. Overall exposure was at ISO 125, 1/125 sec at f/11, using my Canon 24-105L at 88mm.
In this shot, I setup the black backdrop after moving all of the lights forward two metres or so to ensure that neither the main nor fill lights spilled onto the black muslin background. Since the background was going to be jet black, I took the opportunity to light Barb’s blonde hair more brilliantly, using a third Novatron monolight (300ws) with a small Photoflex softbox, metered to f/11. This third light made all the difference to the result. Exposure, again at ISO 125, was f/11 at 1/125 sec.
What was literally the final shot of the day turned out to be, in my opinion, the best image of the lot, though this time with a white background. I lit the white muslin background to f/16.2 using two Novatron 500 monolights with black Photoflex umbrellas. The main light was again positioned to the left of the camera, but I reduced its intensity to f/4.5 and correspondingly reduced the fill light (my Novatron 300 this time), also making the two lights more balanced so the overall lighting effect would be a bit more even. Doing so meant that the exposure would be at f/8 and I would have two full stops difference between the subject and the background, so as to guarantee that the background would be completely white. Again I used my tiny slave unit as a hair light, which gives enough highlights to the shot given that the background is white. Again, my Canon 7D was set to 1/125 sec at ISO 125, but this time at f/8.