**photos at the end of the post**
I had the pleasure of joining another photographer to do some portrait photography in his studio. Most of my portraiture is done on location outdoors because I love the scenary and the possibilities are endless. Another plus side is that I don’t have to spend that much money re-creating an outdoor scene indoors. A disadvantage to working outdoors is the act of controlling light to get the exact picture you want.
To change things around, my photography friend and I put up some background paper from Calumet that you can get for about $45. He had made his own background support that hung off the wall. Much cheaper than buying a heavy-duty background support which can cost over $100. You lose out on mobility though.
We worked on both white (high-key) and black background. What we found is that high-key portraits can get quite boring, especially if the model (in this case me and him) are not that good of a model. High-key portraits works well with interesting models and outfits.
The way we set this up is that there are two Travelite 750’s and an umbrella pointed toward the background, one on each side. Since this is high-key, they have to be brighter than your subject light so we set them at f11. We set up a beauty dish right above the camera pointed toward the model with a reflector underneath pointing upwards to get rid of any shadows. The beauty dish was set at f10 and my camera was shooting at iso 100 at 160th of a second at f10. The way we came up with these settings was by using a meter. Definitely makes things go faster and smoother.
For the black background.. which I call dramatic lighting, we had one softbox directly to the left of the model. Still using f10, we played with distance and different outfits.
Between high-key and dramatic, I prefer dramatic lighting because it’s more interesting than high-key. You get to play with shadows and limiting light to the subject. Maybe I’ll make a switch to studio photography.
Mouse over to the side edge of the image and click for the next image
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