Portrait Lighting Class Workshop

In today's lecture Mr F gave some insight into how to achieve a certain portrait look via the set up of lights within the studio. Firstly we looked at the photography of Jill Greenberg whose fine art portraits display a halo of light around the sitter. http://www.manipulator.com/

Like above the majority of Greenburg's images are of small children but they have not been photographed as children are usually seen as being happy and carefree but whilst they are showing a state of upset, pain or unhappiness. Yet still due to the way Greenburg has portrayed them through her clever and powerful lighting technique this shows the viewer a powerful message of being beautiful through their innocence even through a state of distress. The halo of light for me symbolizes that they are but angels through happiness or sadness brought upon them in the world.

The above photograph of Gwen Stefani is definately one of my favourite images of Greenberg. Taking the photograph from a lower angel to the sitter has given Gwen a majestic value of importance. The lighting used giving a full halo of light around her body conveys a message that she is a beautiful goddess. This type of image reminds me of the work of David Lachapelle due to the bright and detailed colours within the final image, although Greenberg's photographs are much more of a tamer nature compared to the very expressive, energetic and fascinating works of one of my most loved photographic artists Mr LaChapelle.

http://www.lachapellestudio.com

So to achieve a 'halo look' we set up the studio with the use of five lights, the main key light being the raised Beauty dish pointed down onto the sitter (which was one of our fellow student's Mark) and four surrounding lights around Mark - two with honeycomb masks both at 45 degree angles behind Mark and another two at 45 degree angles in front of mark - thus creating a cross lighting effect.

The two lights at the back of Mark were of a wattage of 250 (GM250) where the two lights at the front of Mark were of a higher wattage of 500 (GM500).

The meter reading taken from the highlight shining from Marks ear from the back lights gave F11.5 at a shutter speed of 1/125 and from the front of his face from the front lights gave a reading of F8.5 at a shutter speed of 1/125 - ISO 200.

Therefore compensating the difference between the readings we took the following photographs using a aperture of F11, shutter speed 1/125 at ISO 200.

As you can see the halo of light is showing around marks face shot on the FLASH White Balance however to achieve a cooler colour look we set our colour balance to K4000 to add the bluish tint seen in Greenberg's images. The below image was shot using White Fluorescent light balance (Approx 4000K). I found using this white balance gave Marks skin tone an unnatural look like the overall image had a bluish/purplish tint!

I therefore manually set my white balance to 4000K which gave a much more pleasing and natural look to the final image

Within our second sequence of shots we did not use the front two 45 degree lights and re-metered from the above key light which again after compensating gave a reading of F11 at 1/125.

WB Flash

"Strike a Pose" - Really like this shot and definitely prefer just shooting with the use of the above and two front 45 degree lights !

F16 @ 1/125 WB Flash

From F-Stopping up 1 (allowing less light to pass via the aperture) you can see the different mood created, showing very little highlights apart from a the slight few on Mark's face.

F11 @ 1/125 WB Fluorescent

"Almost angelic"

Our third sequence of shots where taking with the use of the top light only of which the effects of the halo lighting are very minimal compared to using all or part of the set up as shown in the diagram picture above

Within the 2nd part of the workshop we experimented with different angles of view photographing Natalie with the use of continuous lighting with one 45/45 degree light above head height. Setting our DSLR camera's to shoot in monochrome only!