Half of day, one model, two looks and here’s how we did the lighting.
Hey guys welcome to Phlearn my name is Aaron Nace. You can find me on Twitter @aknacer,
today we are taking a look at behind the scenes and how we did a recent shoot involving one
model with two completely separate looks and we’re going to show you how we did the lighting
for each of them. The concept was to bring a model into the
studio, get two interesting shots out of it with two interesting lighting setups and not
take a whole long time to do it, so we did both of these looks in under four hours. The
first shot we’re going to talk about is the jump shot and photo wrapping someone from
full body is quite different from photographing just a portrait. First of all when you’re
using a portrait, you don’t have a whole lot of area, so your lighting modifiers tend
to be a little bit smaller. You can get away with smaller reflectors and view your distances
and things like that. If you’re photographing a large area like a whole a scene or someone
that is full body you need slightly larger lighting with modifiers and they are going
to create a more even look across the subject. In order for this to look natural we were
going for a little bit like a stormy, cloudy day in which a little bit of light would actually
be coming from above. Now obviously this is shot in a studio, it doesn’t look like it’s
natural light, but we did want a large light for us to come from above, so that’s why
we put a Parabolic reflector all the way completely above our subject and that’s boomed out.
That’s actually the main light in the shot and that’s what creates the look that we
can see to kind of give the entire top of our subject, that really nice rim and highlights
things like the hair detail, all the fur, and even the dirt flying around. Once our
subject is comfortable with the direction that they were going to be jumping we decided
we needed a couple more lights that would kind of outline their facial features a little
bit. We wanted something that was really going to catch in their eyes, separates them out
from everything else that is going on as well as provides a little bit more of that red
light. To create that catch light you we put a seven
inch reflector off to the camera on the left and that’s just trying to direct me into
the subject’s eyes, so that is going right to your end really carving their face out
from everything else. For the rest of the room we used another Parabolic and that falls
to the left of the camera as well, so we’ve got those two lights off to the camera left,
one just a small point light going directly to our subject face and the other is quite
a bit larger and that’s just really creating that nice frame. Now when we started the shoot
all we had was the light on the top and then the two there on the left. The right one we’re
leaving completely blank and that would be a lot more like what natural light does. Natural
light tends to kind of come from one direction, so it was like top and from one side. The
problem was we were not really getting much detail there on the camera right, so we decided
to add another soft box, this time just a small soft box and we brought the power pretty
far down on that, so it’s not really carved out the subject, it doesn’t extenuate much
to the subject, it just adds a little bit of detail there where it was going almost
complete black. For our lighting we’re using Paul Buff Einstein,
so it’s a laceration on those is extremely short, meaning the timing of which the flash
fires those all the way up to the full intensity and then back down to zero is a very, very
short amount of time, so what it does it’s very good at capturing movement and any time
you’re having someone jump in the air or doing some kind of action and we you want
to freeze it, you want to make sure your flash rations are very short.
To make the shot a little more interesting we decided to add some thick sand into the
mix so it would make it look like almost like he’s jumping through an environment, so
the sand we sprinkled on his shoulders and his head before every single shot, and even
put some on his hands, so he’d be jumping through the shot he kind of releases the sand
and it slows all the way back behind him. Now in both directions we are going to photograph
even more sand this time on its own and add that to the shot to make it really look like
he’s kind of jumping through a mixture of sand and rocks that really add a lot of interest
to the shot. Here’s another secret, we use baby oil in a lot of our shoots.
We put a little bit of baby oil on the skin of our subject and that really helps define
the skin a little bit better, so those nice highlights you see carved out with his muscular
frame, those are because of the baby oil. Any time we get a model in our studio we really
love to take advantage of the time, so that means usually getting a couple of different
shots even if the models, the same model, the same wardrobe and everything, but it will
just give you a little bit more variety and when publishing these images it gives you
a little bit more of a story to kind of go behind. In this case we talked about the jumping
shot and that was kind of our action shot. The second shot is more of like and intensive
shot, maybe this is the night before, he’s thinking about how he’s going to conquering
his enemies or whatever, but this is going to be our tentative shot.
To really start we really did want him to look a little bit more natural as well, but
still pretty dramatic, so we’re lighting it again from the top and from the sides,
but all of our lighting modifiers goes down inside because we’re not photographing his
entire body. The lighting from above instead of being a giant 86 inch Parabolic reflector
we actually used a much smaller light, this is a seven inch reflector and it has a 46
degree spot grade so that spot grade really directs the light, so the light is going out
at a thick beam like this, it really kind of directs it in just so it’s going to hit
the top of our subject’s head, it’s not even much on their shoulder. Now the lighting
power was turned down and we didn’t want it to be like something that was really calling
a lot of attention to the top of his head, mostly just for the detail. Now that we have
our hair lighting place what we want to do is carve out the rest of his face with the
light and often times if your lighting the subject, if you could put up the light right
in front of the subject their going to be bright and their lips, it’s not really going
to be that interesting, so playing around with the shadows and the highlights is a lot
of fun and to do that we need a large area of our subject, but we still need to control
the fall off. In other words we wanted to dictate where the light went from light all
the way into shadow and to do that we use two lights.
The first light is back behind our subject and that’s just a medium size soft box,
now that lighting most of the subject from behind, but the real important light here
is the beauty dish and that’s a little bit off to the side and it’s got a 40 degrees
spot on it as well. That grid just like the grid on the hair light is directing the light
right to where we want it, so we can decide if we move it slightly to the right or the
left if not we’re going to bring the shadow highlight line from here to here, to here,
each of those are going to give you a completely different attach.
The combinations of those three lights, each of which is really focused gives us a great
portrait, that it gives some detail, but it doesn’t give you too much information, so
it doesn’t give away the whole story, your still kind of left guessing at what else is
there. Here’s a cool trick, you want someone to look like pensive and emotional just have
them look at the floor, it’s a really simple trick and it works out on trained models as
well as untrained models, just have them kind of like look down and drop their chin and
it works pretty much every time, that’s why he looks pretty depressed right now, so
that’s good. That’s both of our lighting setups in a nutshell.
It’s really cool to be able to bring a model on set and have one specific look and when
we’re done with that just switch up the lighting a little bit and get a completely
different look out of your subject and not take a whole lot of time doing it.
To achieve drama we tend to light people from behind instead of the front, but that’s
just how we do it. How do you guys go about achieving drama in your photo shoot? Let us
know any comments down below. Thanks so much for watching guys, I’ll Phlearn
you later. Bye everyone.