First attempt at Portrait Lighting - cc plz

[SquarePeg36 7]

Great expression, nice lighting... right hand posing... FAIL! Never present the back of the hand to the viewer (unless it's appropriate; say a sporting image), and never display tension in the hand. The location is also too high on the cheek; bring it down, have her relax it, and turn it so at least it's not full on back to the viewer.

Will be doing a reshoot of this pose and really appreciate the detailed feedback, thanks.

 

[Derrel]

I looked at the first shot posted, and my feeling was that the shadows were too dense, that the black point is set too strongly, which is something I've noticed in a number of your photos. I'd like to see a little bit more detail in the shadows of the hair, and in the shirt. I think this is a black point setting issue. There's a second and third shot posted too, and in those I think the eyes look a little bit too dark, with not quite the level of eye iris detail/color that would make the most impact.

I haven't had time to have read the comments of the other respondents to your post. I guess I'd say that for a first effort at portrait lighting, that your captures look okay, but the post-processing stage could help to enhance the original captures. If these were shot in .RAF mode, there might be enough bit depth to work on the blacks and to boost the detail in the darker parts of the hair and shirt. Perhaps the eyes could be lightened up a bit (in PS or in Lightroom's "iris enhance" tool).

This type of lighting might also translate nicely to B&W portraits, where deeper blacks can often create strong contrast and drama.

 

[Derrel]

One suggestion that you might try in the next portrait session with here would be to turn her body away from the light, so the light rakes across the torso, and turn her head the opposite direction, so her face is turned back, toward the key light. Aligning the face and the torso in the same direction is a traditional masculine posing strategy, and is many think, less-flattering for most women than is a cross-body head placement.

You can also experiment with short lighting versus broad lighting. I think with her facial shape, I might try some short lighting set-ups and see how she looks illuminated that way, with both an aligned head/torso pose and with a cross-body pose. Body and head alignment depends too on the desired "look" or "ethos"; she's wearing an athletic type shirt and has a lot of bare arm showing, so striving for a strong, healthy, athletic body and head pose makes a lot of sense. If she were wearing say a formal, traditional blouse or blouse+sweater or jacket look, then the body posing could be done differently than in this wardrobe.

 

[SquarePeg36 7]

I looked at the first shot posted, and my feeling was that the shadows were too dense, that the black point is set too strongly, which is something I've noticed in a number of your photos. I'd like to see a little bit more detail in the shadows of the hair, and in the shirt. I think this is a black point setting issue. There's a second and third shot posted too, and in those I think the eyes look a little bit too dark, with not quite the level of eye iris detail/color that would make the most impact.

I haven't had time to have read the comments of the other respondents to your post. I guess I'd say that for a first effort at portrait lighting, that your captures look okay, but the post-processing stage could help to enhance the original captures. If these were shot in .RAF mode, there might be enough bit depth to work on the blacks and to boost the detail in the darker parts of the hair and shirt. Perhaps the eyes could be lightened up a bit (in PS or in Lightroom's "iris enhance" tool).

This type of lighting might also translate nicely to B&W portraits, where deeper blacks can often create strong contrast and drama.

Yes, the blackpoint is definitely an issue in these. I increased it in post because the background was showing up too light. I wanted a black background but only had a dark gray sheet to work with. I moved the lights as far from the background as I could but the sheet was still showing just a bit too much. I haven’t mastered masking with Affinity Photo yet but am working on that today so will try a re-edit of the raw files once I think I’ve got that down and then I can just darken the background and not affect the rest. That may resolve the eye issue as well. She has blue eyes but in most indoor photos they look dark.

One suggestion that you might try in the next portrait session with here would be to turn her body away from the light, so the light rakes across the torso, and turn her head the opposite direction, so her face is turned back, toward the key light. Aligning the face and the torso in the same direction is a traditional masculine posing strategy, and is many think, less-flattering for most women than is a cross-body head placement.

You can also experiment with short lighting versus broad lighting. I think with her facial shape, I might try some short lighting set-ups and see how she looks illuminated that way, with both an aligned head/torso pose and with a cross-body pose. Body and head alignment depends too on the desired "look" or "ethos"; she's wearing an athletic type shirt and has a lot of bare arm showing, so striving for a strong, healthy, athletic body and head pose makes a lot of sense. If she were wearing say a formal, traditional blouse or blouse+sweater or jacket look, then the body posing could be done differently than in this wardrobe.

Off to google short lighting...

Thanks for the feedback Derrel!

 

[Derrel]

Bob Bill's comments in this thread reveal somebody who understand the subtleties of masculine and feminine body positioning and key light placement and direction. This type of commentary is hard to find because so many people have learned photography from YouTube and from journeymen teachers over the last decade, and because this type of knowledge is not widely passed along nor absorbed these days. This thread is also brief, but touches on the idea that one lights people not by simple rule, but by their age and character (and by the desired end result, which is implicit but not mentioned specifically); that's what I mean by the athletic wear vs formal clothing,and how those might be posed differently.

Feminine vs. Masculine Primary Light Source Orientation

You can look up broad and short lighting, but most of the example photos on-line on a Google search show no comparison of the two,basic body/face orientation opposites, but just a single broad vs short lighting, with only ONE body/face orientation.

 

[SquarePeg36 7]

I think everyone has covered most of the serious points (good work on the lighting etc) so that leaves the picky stuff that everyone points out to me that I've missed.

Unlike Dan I assumed that she wasn't high but she does looked b.o.r.e.d. (get on with it Mother, I want to get back to snapchat!).
Do you talk as you shoot? Talk to your subject, joke, encourage, DIRECT them towards the expression you want and when they hit it or even get close ENTHUSE and tell them how fantastic they look. That was hard for me to learn to do but it is SO worth the effort because it works wonders and you see your subject start to glow and perform for the camera.
Shoulders. The hair over her right shoulder in this case prevents football shoulders but it's good practice to have your female subjects stand at an angle of about 35 to 45 degrees and turn their heads towards the camera.
Before you shoot a series of shots look at your subject and check for things that are out of place. She may have been perfect when she entered the studio or for the previous batch of shots but check again. Somehow that necklace got skewed around and it's distracting.

This is all stuff I learned from some of the stalwarts here to whom I owe what small skill I have gained over the last few years. It feels odd to be passing it on.

I will add in fairness that young teens (especially your own kids) who have their arms twisted to model for you are notoriously difficult subjects. No matter how attractive they are they tend to lack confidence. I personally much prefer to shoot women over 25, or even better, women over 45.

P.S. All my studio strobes are stuff off Ebay or Amazon and the only item that cost more than about £60 is my new vinyl wall mounted backdrop. If you can afford it brand names are fine but you don't have to break the bank and reduce your family to penury .

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions about posing.

Yes she was bored but that’s ok, at least she was “willing” to help (in exchange for a ride to the mall afterwards...). This was more about me learning to use lighting and trying out some of the things I’d been watching in online tutorials than anything else...

 

[Cortian]

Most of the photos I've taken I didn't expect to come out nicely--or at least as nicely as I'd like. Much less be award-winning. What I hope to do is figure out the mistakes, or have somebody point them out, and eventually Get It Right

 

[ac12]

Still have a long way to go, especially with any post processing work but hoping to get some feedback on the lighting (and whatever else you think would be helpful). Watched a couple of videos and decided I had enough of a clue to get into some trial and error. I have a few more that I’ll post later but this one is pretty representative of the lighting in all. What do you think? Suggestions for next tine? This was with 2 softboxes. Key light camera left at a 45 degree angle, 2nd softbox used for hair light maybe should have been a bit higher?

Better than I could do.

Thoughts:

• Maybe a bit of fill light. Either with a reflector or another flash/strobe.
  • But this really depends on the look that you are going for.
• Hair light
  • The angle of the hair light depends on what YOU want it to look like.
    
  • The traditional hair lights that I have seen light up the top of the head. But for a hobbyist, a horizontal boom supported light is a luxury that I do not have, nor the room to make it work. So I am still working on a practical hair light setup that will work for me.
• Black background with a brunette is a problem, to get the hair separated from the background. I would have used a grey, dark grey or mottled background, just to get that hair/background separation.
  • Having a small assortment of different backgrounds to choose from helps.
  • I think the default for a single background is a mottled background.
  • A background light can lighten the background to give you that background/hair separation.
• BUT, the serious look on her face does match with the black background.
  • So I would go with trying to illuminate the hair to give you the hair/background separation.
• The pendant is off centered. OK, I'm a little OCD, and not being centered bothers my eye.
  • Jewelry in general can be a problem, because bright/shiny/brightly colored objects/jewelry will attract/distract the eye from the subjects face. So it can both compliment or detract from the subject.
  • In this case, if the pendant was centered, it would not have bothered me, but because it is off-centered, it becomes a distraction.

To your questions:

• Flash/strobes do not mix with continuous lights. You have to put a CTO filter on the flash/strobes to bring their color temp down to incandescent temp. This is something that I would just as well avoid, so best to use a single type of light source.
  
• IMHO, when you start out, you want to use either continuous light or a strobe with a modeling light. This is so that you can see the light and shadow as you are positioning the light and the subject.
  • When I say strobe, I mean either a pack/head system (like Speedotron Brownline) or a monolight, which have modeling lights. I do NOT mean a shoe flash or similar.
    
  • If you use a shoe flash (strobist style), you have to wait till after the shot to see what the lighting looks like. So learning is much slower than with a continuous light or modeling light. Because, visualizing what the light and shadow will look like, takes time and experience to learn. And unless you are tethered to a computer and monitor, I find the little screen on the back of the camera too small for me to evaluate lighting very well.
• For continuous lighting, I would try to look for a lighting source other than a HOT light. Because a HOT is HOT, and uncomfortable to work under for any length of time. CFL or LED are much cooler to work under for long periods of time.
  
• For continuous lighting, get MATCHING bulbs, so the color temp is the same. Don't use a combination of daylight, warm white and cool white, because the color temp of each bulb is different. And at the store, make sure that what is labeled on the box is what is inside. I've seen where people have switched bulbs around.
  
• In a studio situation, I would lock down the white balance to whatever light source you are using. This is so that the camera is not changing the white balance under your feet. If your camera does not have a WB setting for the light you are using, do a custom white balance.

 

[Derrel]

SquarePeg,
I pulled these three shots into Lightroom and hit AUTO, and it reverted them to a more-or-less the straight out of camera look, which really had a different "feel" to them. I was unaware that you had pulled the background way down to black until you mentioned it; the way these had originally been lighted and exposed was in some ways, better than the as-shown images with the backdrop pulled down to black. I think that perhaps these would be good processed with the original-toned, lighter backdrop.

A couple Christmases ago, I shot a bunch of location studio-lit portraits in front of a medium-gray fabric background, and I pulled the whole exposure down by about 3.0 EV, so the backdrop was black, and then in Lightroom, used the Dodge tool set to 0.7 EV Plus-Exposure, and using an adjustment brush, painted back on the light, in four passes of 0.7 EV each....worked great! I got the black backdrop, but was able to make the people look good.

I think the same processing approach would work with that backdrop.

 

[SquarePeg36 7]

Still have a long way to go, especially with any post processing work but hoping to get some feedback on the lighting (and whatever else you think would be helpful). Watched a couple of videos and decided I had enough of a clue to get into some trial and error. I have a few more that I’ll post later but this one is pretty representative of the lighting in all. What do you think? Suggestions for next tine? This was with 2 softboxes. Key light camera left at a 45 degree angle, 2nd softbox used for hair light maybe should have been a bit higher?

Better than I could do.

Thoughts:

• Maybe a bit of fill light. Either with a reflector or another flash/strobe.
  • But this really depends on the look that you are going for.
• Hair light
  • The angle of the hair light depends on what YOU want it to look like.
    
  • The traditional hair lights that I have seen light up the top of the head. But for a hobbyist, a horizontal boom supported light is a luxury that I do not have, nor the room to make it work. So I am still working on a practical hair light setup that will work for me.
• Black background with a brunette is a problem, to get the hair separated from the background. I would have used a grey, dark grey or mottled background, just to get that hair/background separation.
  • Having a small assortment of different backgrounds to choose from helps.
  • I think the default for a single background is a mottled background.
  • A background light can lighten the background to give you that background/hair separation.
• BUT, the serious look on her face does match with the black background.
  • So I would go with trying to illuminate the hair to give you the hair/background separation.
• The pendant is off centered. OK, I'm a little OCD, and not being centered bothers my eye.
  • Jewelry in general can be a problem, because bright/shiny/brightly colored objects/jewelry will attract/distract the eye from the subjects face. So it can both compliment or detract from the subject.
  • In this case, if the pendant was centered, it would not have bothered me, but because it is off-centered, it becomes a distraction.

To your questions:

• Flash/strobes do not mix with continuous lights. You have to put a CTO filter on the flash/strobes to bring their color temp down to incandescent temp. This is something that I would just as well avoid, so best to use a single type of light source.
  
• IMHO, when you start out, you want to use either continuous light or a strobe with a modeling light. This is so that you can see the light and shadow as you are positioning the light and the subject.
  • When I say strobe, I mean either a pack/head system (like Speedotron Brownline) or a monolight, which have modeling lights. I do NOT mean a shoe flash or similar.
    
  • If you use a shoe flash (strobist style), you have to wait till after the shot to see what the lighting looks like. So learning is much slower than with a continuous light or modeling light. Because, visualizing what the light and shadow will look like, takes time and experience to learn. And unless you are tethered to a computer and monitor, I find the little screen on the back of the camera too small for me to evaluate lighting very well.
• For continuous lighting, I would try to look for a lighting source other than a HOT light. Because a HOT is HOT, and uncomfortable to work under for any length of time. CFL or LED are much cooler to work under for long periods of time.
  
• For continuous lighting, get MATCHING bulbs, so the color temp is the same. Don't use a combination of daylight, warm white and cool white, because the color temp of each bulb is different. And at the store, make sure that what is labeled on the box is what is inside. I've seen where people have switched bulbs around.
  
• In a studio situation, I would lock down the white balance to whatever light source you are using. This is so that the camera is not changing the white balance under your feet. If your camera does not have a WB setting for the light you are using, do a custom white balance.

Thanks for your detailed feedback. Much appreciated!

SquarePeg,
I pulled these three shots into Lightroom and hit AUTO, and it reverted them to a more-or-less the straight out of camera look, which really had a different "feel" to them. I was unaware that you had pulled the background way down to black until you mentioned it; the way these had originally been lighted and exposed was in some ways, better than the as-shown images with the backdrop pulled down to black. I think that perhaps these would be good processed with the original-toned, lighter backdrop.

A couple Christmases ago, I shot a bunch of location studio-lit portraits in front of a medium-gray fabric background, and I pulled the whole exposure down by about 3.0 EV, so the backdrop was black, and then in Lightroom, used the Dodge tool set to 0.7 EV Plus-Exposure, and using an adjustment brush, painted back on the light, in four passes of 0.7 EV each....worked great! I got the black backdrop, but was able to make the people look good.

I think the same processing approach would work with that backdrop.

Thanks for taking the time to look at them in LR. I should have elaborated in my initial posting that I set out to copy a certain dark fashion portrait look that I’d seen done in a Creative Live tutorial. It was a dark haired model in a sleeveless black top against a black background. The actual background they used was gray but they used grids to keep the light from hitting it. I tried to do it without grids by moving away from the background but didn’t get far enough out. Also, didn’t expect the sheet to show up so didn’t bother ironing it!

I’ll have to download the raw files to my laptop and try your suggestions. Again thanks for the detailed response.

 

[Derrel]

One issue that might have made things tough for you was the use of continuous lighting. With continuous lights, the exposure settings are often a rather slowish shutter time, and a moderate to wide aperture value, like say from 1/20 second to maybe 1/40 second at ISO 400 and an f/stop ranging from f/2.8 to perhaps f/4.8 or something in that general range; that means that, quite often, the exposure triangle (speed,aperture,and ISO level) creates a background that registers pretty clearly...revealing the wrinkles in the sheet for example, at an exposure that is correct for the face.

If on Creative Live they were using flash illumination, it would have been pretty easy for them to "drive down" the backdrop value all the way to black, in a way that's much harder to do with continuous lights of low to normal power levels during daylight hours. With flash at say f/8 at 1/200 second at ISO 100, almost anything indoors under the normal room lights gets verrrry dark!

 

[Peeb70 6]

This is a great thread! I'm learning a lot.

 

[SquarePeg36 7]

I was shooting at f3.6, ISO 200 and around 1/250 give it take a stop on either side.

The CL video used only continuous light in the studio but they had much larger soft boxes and also a couple of other lights - one she kept calling a barn door and another was an octobox I think. It was a “live” one so can’t rewatch it now but it was excellent.

 

[SquarePeg36 7]

Ok, tried to take in the excellent advice and feedback from everyone. Again thanks so much to all who responded for taking the time to look and to share your comments and knowledge. I couldn’t reshoot due to time constraints today but I did re-edit another from that session taking your advice and suggestions into account. Would love any additional critique or comments that you care to share.

White balance warmer - check
Bump to exposure and highlights for a glow - check?
Slight bump to contrast - check
Desaturated weird neon color in lips - check
Leave black point alone - check
Leave background light enough to show hair - check (although I don’t care for the way it came out when I tried to hide the wrinklesin the sheet)
Show more detail in shadows of hair - check
Eyes lighter - check
Necklace straightened - check
No weirdly placed or cut off hands - check

 

[Designer]

It's still short lighting, though. Try one in broad light.