Play-Day in The Studio

[DanOstergren21]

A good friend of mine owns a local rental studio, and sometimes he will let me use the studio to experiment with lighting. When this happens I just ask him to be my model, which works out because he is the type of person I gravitate towards photographing anyways.

This first lighting setup incorporates just one flash and a white V-flat reflector. The flash is in a large octabox (any sort of softbox modifier should work though) positioned behind the backdrop, but higher than the backdrop crossbar. The white V-flat reflector is positioned to camera left, reflecting very soft light back onto the subject. For this setup you want to avoid letting the light modifier hang over the backdrop, otherwise it will cause every wrinkle and crease in the backdrop to show.

Lighting diagram:

Results:
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The second lighting setup incorporates two flash heads and a white V-flat reflector. The main light is in a 65 inch parabolic white umbrella with a diffuser, positioned camera-right, aimed directly at the white V-flat reflector which is positioned to camera left directly opposite the main flash. The point of this is to make it so that none of the light from the main light source is falling directly on the subject, instead only using the indirect falloff light, while using the V-flat reflector to bounce some of that light back towards the model for some fill light. The second flash was used as a subtle hair light, in a 4ft gridded strip box. For anyone unfamiliar with the term hair light, it's a light source positioned above and slightly behind your subject, aimed at their head. This is used to light up the hair a little bit with a little bit of rim lighting, but in this case because my subject has a shaved head, I kept the output for this particular flash very low in order to have a very subtle effect.

Lighting diagram:

Results:
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