During a studio session, in which I photograph people, I try to use different kinds of lighting.
With An, I wanted to create a high key lighting, which means that the photograph consists of mainly whites. In terms of a portrait, you want to over expose most of the skintones so that it renders mostly white. Only her hair, her eyes, nose and mouth as well as the basic outlines of her face and arms are seen, which is enough to create the suggestion of a person. Ideally, for a high key portrait, you want blond hair, but that’s perhaps asking a bit much from my models ….
Jürgen Doom
Update - Caro asked for the lighting setup. Well, I used 2 studio lights. One light was used to evenly illuminate the white background, which is slightly over exposed compared to An. Therefore, the background is white. An was lit by one large softbox, which was placed in front of An, about head’s hight, slightly tilted downwards. At waist level I added a silver reflector in order to reflect a large amount of light coming from above back in to An, thus creating an evenly lit portrait. The exposure was of course a bit over normal exposure in order to get the desired effect. Post processing was done in lightroom, mainly adjusting exposure and black clipping.
In the previous post I explained how I photographed Myrte, a 6 year old girl, in a field on a bright sunny day.
After the initial shots without flash, I decided to use a flash (Nikon SB 900, triggerd with pocket wizards) to brighten up the shadow side of Myrte. Since the sun was coming in from behind her (at left), I had to lighten up the right side of her face and body. In order to do so, I choose to balance the light from my strobe (speedlight) against the sun so that the amount of flash added to Myrte would compensate for the loss of light on her shadow side.
This was done by adjusting the level of the speedlight. It was aimed directly at Myrte (no use of any translucent material such as umbrella, ….).
The images were downloaded into Adobe Lightroom 2, where I adjusted the image to my liking (by boosting the blacks, exposure and by bringing back the saturation).
This next image was converted into black and white (with boosted highlights and blacks, in order to keep a balance in the image).
After about 10 minutes into the shoot, Myrte wanted to wear her “princess” dress. So after a change of clothing we continued the shoot. Notice the very light sky which, in effect, had a rather deep blue appearance. But by overexposing a bit I rendered the sky lighter than it was in reality.
Finally we had some action going. I asked Myrte to turn around a few times in order to get movement in her dress. Due to the fact that I used a flashlight I was able to “stop” the action without getting blur in her face.
