C&C Please... "Baby Chef" :D

[SabrinaO]

Please C&C the lighting on this adorable little boy...
I'm trying to get a nice light with lots of depth. I shoot with a strobe camera right and a fill directly behind me. I see there are no shadows really on the paper... so I guess the depth is not really there?? Is this lighting flat?
I practiced with my son with just one light (camera right) to see how that would look and I didn't like the results. All the time during sessions i wind up changing the light positions and power output at each change of scene. It seems like ive been trying to get a nice combination of light since forever! I'm just trying to get a universal light setup that i can stick with..


Also... does the baby look red to you? I desaturated the reds up until the reds started turning gray. Is there another method?

 

[eggmanmeggan]

I like them- simple,cute and well done. I would pay for you take photos of my kids like this. (if I had kids haha) I am planning a baby-candy shoot this Friday with a few families BECAUSE it brings in money ; )

I use LR3 to edit and to deal with pink/red babies or maternity bellies I add luminance to the red and that evens out the tones a bit, then I tweak the saturation from there. Sometimes I will tweak the orange too. Other then that I don't know any other ways so I will be interested to see if anyone adds in more useful info.

Good job : )

 

[Bend The Light]

I like them too. Yes, he does look a bit red, but the previous poster helped there (I wouldn't know). But if I could take baby pics half as good I'd be well off.

 

[g-fi]

Great shots! There is a bit of red, but I don't hate it. The even lighting in this situation is not a bad thing, I think it's very flattering! Having a different color seamless would really set this set off, that or blowing out the backdrop so it's white. Good job!

 

[subscuck]

The lighting, focus, and poses are fine. My only niggle is the Toque blends in with the bg a little too much in some of the shots. A slightly darker bg may have worked better.

 

[tirediron]

I think the images have been critiqued fairly thoroughly. With respect to your questions: Your WB is a little warm; EXIF data shows it to be 6000K; I'm assuming your lights were closer to 5600K so that may account for some of it. Depending on what camera you're shooting, I would set WB to 'Auto', shoot RAW and fine-tune in post (Nikons tend to do a very good job of capturing an accurate WB in the 'Auto' setting, not sure of others).

As for a lighting set-up, there really is no universal set-up. You can come up with a couple of different set-ups that will work well for most situations, but that's more like school portraits or Wal-mart. To get the best result for the client, treat every situation as it's own. Look at it, decide what sort of result you want, and light accordingly.