Portrait of a girl in a top hat
I don't do many portraits, but I'm looking for ways to practice some new lighting techniques. A friend of mine asked me to shoot some photos of her and this is one that we liked.
I don't do many portraits, but I'm looking for ways to practice some new lighting techniques. A friend of mine asked me to shoot some photos of her and this is one that we liked.
There is one trick with lighting, but it doesn't touch the subject ;-)
Take a bare flash and point it to the background. Then put something in the front of this light to get some random shadows or ... damn, I have no idea what is English word for what happens when you let the light through the glass or bottle. I used flowers, chairs, toys, anything that seems it may work ;-)
Last example is this (not exactly a portrait ;P ), behind a toy you see solid black background lit through spathiphyllum
I read an article about that technique a while back. I had forgotten it. I think in the article that I had read, the guy was taking pictures of a restaurant, and he put a flash inside one of the potted plants in the restaurant so the foliage would throw cool shadows on the wall of the restaurant. Is that the sort of thing you're talking about?
Exactly :-)
she looks friendly... but i think if you use a little softer light: het skin gets better.
thank you for the tip. I'm doing more portraits in a few hours, and the model was asking me what I could do to make her skin look better. I will pay more attention to how soft the light is. One problem is that if I move the umbrella too close to make the light extra soft, then I don't get any shadows and I was trying to control those. I just have more experimenting that I need to do, I guess.
Another trick is to put the light as close to camera axis as possible. Clamshell lighting works pretty nice here.
But this reduces shadows too, and you lose definition of the face shape.
For me it is much easier to fix the skin in postproduction than to recover missing shadows ;-)
I know what you mean about recovering missing shadows. I honestly do not care much for doing these portrait type shots. I am doing them basically to sharpen my lighting skills for practice so when I do take pix that are important to me, I can make them as good as possible. I'm really into a lot of conceptual stuff. See Jo Ann Callis or Alva Bernadine for photographers that I really like.
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