Studio Photography

For this week's entry, I thought I'd include a couple examples from a recent portrait shoot:

This was taken with the industry-standard method of subject lighting - the three-point system. Such a system consists of three light sources:

Key: the main light on the subject, and the one for which the shot is metered. In this shot, the "key" is a studio  strobe head with a beauty dish - a silver bowl-shaped light modifier - about 5 feet to the subject's right and about two feet closer to the camera than the subject. This light is stronger than the "fill"

Fill: A secondary light used to "fill" in the shadows created by the key light. In this shot, I used a strobe head with a softbox (like the one I included in the first post) about ten feet to the subject's left and as far from the camera as the subject.

Background: A third light used to illuminate the backdrop or the subject's environment. for this shot I "cheated" and used a silver reflector to bounce the key light towards the gray backdrop. If I'd had a third light I could have placed it beneath the area covered by the frame and behind the subject, then pointed it up at the backdrop, which would have turned the gray backdrop white.

This shot can be called "high-key" - there's a great deal of light in the image, and the few shadows cast are not terribly dark thanks to our fill light. This means a smooth, well-lit image that lends itself towards happier, calmer emotions.

Here's a less-conventional example:

For this shot, I used a strobe with a gridded softbox as the key. Grids, which are simply net-like strips of black fabric that are stretched across the face of a softbox, are used to make the light from the softbox more specular (rather than diffuse) - leaving shadows that are harder than a traditional softbox but still not as harsh as a beauty dish or a silver reflector or umbrella.

For the fill, I used a reflector disk - a foldable circle covered on one side in bronze-colored foil. This is what gives the left side of the subject's face a golden sheen.

This shot could be considered "low-key" - there isn't a whole lot of light in the image, and there's a great deal of contrast between the most-illuminated and least-illuminated parts of the subject. This kind of lighting begets uncertainty and intensity. Here's a diagram of the setup for this shot, including the aperture recommended by my light meter for proper exposure on either side of the subject. Because the key was on the subject's left side, I set my camera to expose for the light on that side of her face, giving an aperture of f/8.

As far as equipment goes, I departed from my usual speedlight setup to borrow a Speedotron-brand multilight system. This kind of system consists of a power supply - a single unit containing the capacitors that hold the charge for each flash - and multiple individual flash heads, each of which has its own strobe, modeling light, and cooling fan. The lights aren't powered on their own, so they all plug into the same power supply, which houses all of the controls and inputs required to trigger and adjust the lights.

Such a system is much more powerful in terms of output than any amount of portable speedlights, but it also means dealing with heavier equipment, longer setup and adjustment times, more fragile lights and a price tag that can reach into tens of thousands of dollars.