Toddler Headshot for CC

[OGsPhotography]

For CC.
135mm 100ISO f6.3

I pre focused on a toy bear that I was practicing with and then had exactly 1 second to get this shot with a remote as I sat her on the stool before she took off.... full of energy...

Trying to lock down lighting and post before I let others peoples kids in the pop up studio.

And SOOC

 

[zombiesniper113 13]

Overall I think you did a great job.

I'm hoping things like Toddler Headshot and

Then she was gone lol.

Were not part of conversation while shooting.

 

[Derrel]

Very high technical quality this setup yields! (Say that in a Yoda voice for maximum effect!)

I think the pictures are too large on-screen to appreciate...need to scroll quite a bit to "see" the whole image at this large size.

I'd prefer to see a little bit more DOF at such close range and at such high magnification. If seen at reduced size, like say 900 pixels tall or whatot, the DOF would look deeper, to the eye, due to the recuced size of the image. But yeah...this is a nice, clean look. The main light and the backdrop look mostly good together, but I think the background light is coming back and hitting the sides of the head, and is causing some burn-out of the hair on the outer sides of the head. This is not overly-objectionable, but there is a littlke bit of that "hanging down chains as hair outline" kind of effect. The hair is being lighted from behind, and so the outline of the hair is over-exposed, and then goes right into NO backlighting, so if a person looks, they can see that "backlighted-chains" sort of effect.

I dunno...some people will take a big brush and clone out the flyaway hairs to pure white, or use the recovery slider to bring back more hair and more detail in the hair; this depends on hair color too...on blondes, the effect is less-noticeable I think.

I looked at one image in Lightroom: it has tremendous adjustment potential... plenty of detail, plenty of light, can go to B&W, split tone, etc. Overall, very high quality lighting for a little person, with the heights you have the posing stool, the camera, and the main and the under-chin reflector.

Maybe too punchy? Too "Hollywood"? The original JPG file had a good exposure...I brightened it up like .25 EV, did a crop, made it more "snappy". Needs just a bit of dry skin under lower lip reotuched, and then is ready for the magazine advertisement! VERY nice eye catchlight pattern in this, very "catchy", no pun intended.

Imagine this lighting setup on a person that would give, oh, say, five minutes of posing!!!

 

[OGsPhotography]

Overall I think you did a great job.

I'm hoping things like Toddler Headshot and

Then she was gone lol.

Were not part of conversation while shooting.

Thank you. I edited my description lol!

Very high technical quality this setup yields! (Say that in a Yoda voice for maximum effect!)

I think the pictures are too large on-screen to appreciate...need to scroll quite a bit to "see" the whole image at this large size.

I'd prefer to see a little bit more DOF at such close range and at such high magnification. If seen at reduced size, like say 900 pixels tall or whatot, the DOF would look deeper, to the eye, due to the recuced size of the image. But yeah...this is a nice, clean look. The main light and the backdrop look mostly good together, but I think the background light is coming back and hitting the sides of the head, and is causing some burn-out of the hair on the outer sides of the head. This is not overly-objectionable, but there is a littlke bit of that "hanging down chains as hair outline" kind of effect. The hair is being lighted from behind, and so the outline of the hair is over-exposed, and then goes right into NO backlighting, so if a person looks, they can see that "backlighted-chains" sort of effect.

I dunno...some people will take a big brush and clone out the flyaway hairs to pure white, or use the recovery slider to bring back more hair and more detail in the hair; this depends on hair color too...on blondes, the effect is less-noticeable I think.

I looked at one image in Lightroom: it has tremendous adjustment potential... plenty of detail, plenty of light, can go to B&W, split tone, etc. Overall, very high quality lighting for a little person, with the heights you have the posing stool, the camera, and the main and the under-chin reflector.View attachment 132538

Maybe too punchy? Too "Hollywood"? The original JPG file had a good exposure...I brightened it up like .25 EV, did a crop, made it more "snappy". Needs just a bit of dry skin under lower lip reotuched, and then is ready for the magazine advertisement! VERY nice eye catchlight pattern in this, very "catchy", no pun intended.

Imagine this lighting setup on a person that would give, oh, say, five minutes of posing!!!

Thank you!

I resized the images in the OP, the SOOC was wrong photo, oops.

I had adjusted the BG light using Histogram, perhaps I should pull to to left just a tiny bit accounting for how close the stool is to the BG.

 

[Derrel]

I resized the images in the OP, the SOOC was wrong photo, oops.

I had adjusted the BG light using Histogram, perhaps I should pull it to the left just a tiny bit accounting for how close the stool is to the BG.

Ahhhh...replacing the SOOC image with the corect one, un-adjusted, shows a slightly dim face, and a VERY white background. So, let's discuss the AS-SHOT pic from today: As-shot, the face exposure is "under" by a bit, and the background paper is rendered pure, detail-free, clean white. NOT so,so bright that a lot of white light is coming back and wrapping aroundher head and giving 1) blowback or 2) lens flaring or 3)both--but the ratio of the lights is not quite optimized. There is more light than needed to make a white paper render as white coming from the speedlight aimed at the paper. There is not quite the right exposure/light given to the face...that exposure is a bit dark. When the face is 'lifted', that drives the white paper backdrop to be a bit more-white than needed.

When a speedlight is aimed at a white paper from a CLOSE range like this, and the subject is also close to that background, the rate of falloff is very, very rapid, and a foot more or less distance from the backdrop paper can mean a stop's difference at close distances. If she were farther in front of the paper, it would still be white. Basically, the backgroung light on white papper, is a bit too intense.(It would probably be white if the papper were med. gray.)

It's a multi-sided coin: your backdrop paper has too much light on it for the lens exposure (f/stop with flash) you gave the face side. Or the light on the face should have been doubled in intensity, at least, to bring that intensity "up" to that of the background.

The tricky part is mixing the types of lights, and their beams. At close-dance, a speedlight can give a very intense, concentrated, narrow-angle of light that delives a LOT of power...while a large octa like that with say a 150 W-S monolight can deliver a softer, much less-intense light that is spread over a wide area.

The key is first, to avoid too-bright a backdrop, one that blasts a LOT of light back and around the head of the sitter, and you did successfully avoid that pitfall. The second goal would be to have a little bit brighter face exposure or a little bit more light on the face. If the face is a bit dark, and you lighten up the whole frame, then there's a chance that the backgroud light will become too strong.

You are working in a demanding, cramped shooting area. The speedlight that close to the paper, and the white-already paper being that close to her means that light meter readings at her ear-distance will vary a LOT if she scoots back just 6 inches on the stool, or slides forward a foot and sits on the front edge of the ottoman. My idea would be to MOVE THE speedlight off to the side, and set it on wide beam, so the Inverse Square Law will work more in your favor. As close as the speedlight and paper/sitter are, the more hyper-critical the backdrop exposure becomes.

The backdrop is already white paper, so it needs less light than you might think to keep it white.
You could have cut the power in half, and moved the speedlight off to the side, and given the FACE side more Watt-seconds of light OR more f/stop (wider aperture), and nailed this perfectly, and it would have looked, SOOC, just as in my re-envisioning.

This is like one big circle. She's a bit too close to the backdrop AND she was not close enough to the main light. Or, the main light needed a doubling of its output in Watt-seconds. Or you could have moved her forward and cut the backdrop speedlight down 1.5 stops, and raised the ISO up one level. And so on and so on. ISO, f/stop, light power, light distance, actual reflective tone of the background paper; it is all interrelated. It can be complicated to discus this stuff in few words, since there are two, different exposures being combined in just ONE camera exposure setting.

This is where an incident light meter reading on her face of say f/8.0 would set the exposure, and a reflected light flashmeter reading taken from the camera distance, off of the backdrop paper, at f/11 or +1.0 over the face f/stop would yield a clean white backdrop that is not too hot.

 

[OGsPhotography]

Thank you.

I set the backdrop in my pre shoot test to simply hit the right in the histogram. This way I knew it wouldnt be too, too hot. A meter sure will be handy, soon enough, as I am starting to understand the need for one. This is why I love bootstrapping, by the time I get a lightmeter hopefully there will be a need for it!

The main was more of a guess based on the test in the teddybear I used as a sit in for the subject; baby-girl. Never had a chance to go back and look! I just hoped for something useable.

I see this kind of outcome as a double sided learning;

A.) As you kindly explained and I can see in the SOOC, the face is a bit underexposed, there could have been a bump in exposure, which there certainly is room for with the 200ws Neewer Tornado in the octa.
I had it set on " four clicks". Not sure how many there are though. Its just a manual dial to turn it up.

B.) Underexposing the subject and bringing up the highlights via Dodging while selectively lowering the Shades with Burning is already half accomplished by underexposing? A la Dani Diamond

On the other hand I feel a more properly exposed photo SOOC with better light control is certainly going to pay dividends with options in the end and therefor I will be trying the background adjustment as suggested and increasing the main. Basically the more techniques understood, the easier each other ir new ine becomes!

Another YN 560iii to use as a second rim light will be on the way shortly and perhaps a second monolight to use as fill after that.

Thanks again @Derrel the help is much appreciated.

 

[jcdeboever]

Great learning thread for me. Thanks for sharing.


Sent from my XT1254 using ThePhotoForum.com mobile app

 

[Derrel]

If you set the background speedlight to a fixed power, you can click the monolight power upward or downward, and see what effect say, f/8 has on the face, and on the background. There are multiple ways to approach this. You can change the ISO, the f/stop on the lens, the flash power on the main light, the flash power on the background, and the flash-to-subject distance, and so on.

If you set the background brightness by histogram review, you'd want to use that same f/stop for the foreground exposure, and that is where the brightness and distance of the main light source will help create the right ratio of foreground to background lighting. (Which YOU get to determine!)

As you mentioned....once can dodge, or burn, a foreground person on a white or a black background, without the post work really showing up too much.