Lighting Diagram - Self Portrait

[nickbedford]

Sunday boredom led to me fooling around with my lighting gear and eventually taking a self portrait. I didn't have a remote so I had to manually focus and stand in the "right" spot but it ended up being about half an inch off (to focus on my eyes).

I used my 83cm shoot through umbrella on a stand about two metres high pointing down to my face (about 15 degrees down). I also used a bare flash to the rear about 2.5m away at roughly the same power as the umbrella flash to add the back lighting.

I used my 50mm F1.8 at 1.8 so the lighting was only set to around 1/16th I think (didn't write it down).

Here is the lighting diagram:



And here is the photo. I wish I had a black backdrop but hey, you get the idea. Though I don't usually do, I added a vignette in Lightroom to focus the portrait a bit.

[zona5101]

Nice work. effective lighting! Thanks for the diagram too...

forgot to add, nice b&w conversion as well.

[nickbedford]

Originally Posted by zona5101

Nice work. effective lighting! Thanks for the diagram too...

Thanks Simple lighting setup can work wonders.

My next idea is to try my hand at coloured gel lighting. Using say, a red gel for the back light.