Portrait Sessions: Week 3

[Corey Thompson]

Here's the third week's photo in my 52 week portrait project. I guess it kinda looks like a Rocky shot minus a ton of muscle mass

I was attempting to do Rembrandt lighting. My first question is, did I come close to accomplishing it? Did I get the angle of the light slightly wrong? Should I have increased or decreased the amount of fill light? Would the shot be more effective with a lighted background or a hair light overhead? I only have one flash to work with and now have a goose neck lamp for use if I can figure out the right combo of stacked gels to get my flash to 2700k to match the bulb in the lamp.

I did very little post processing on this. Any suggestions for post processing?



Exif
Canon 40D
50mm
F6.3
1/250 second

Strobist
45 degrees camera right
1/4 power
sto-fen diffuser
honel 1/8 inch grid
white bounce card for fill light

[3bayjunkie]

Dude! You look just like the old man! You should do an impersonation of him on video. I think you would fool some people. you fooled me with this photo. I thought it really was the old Rocky

[zona5101]

From the position of the catchlights and the bit of light in the far side eye, I'd say your light needs to be a tad bit higher. Now problem with that is with a hat on you will get worse results as the shadow from the brim will come right across your forehead. So you can tilt your head up a bit/move the hat brim up or...call this one good.

[Corey Thompson]

Thank you for the comments.

Originally Posted by zona5101

From the position of the catchlights and the bit of light in the far side eye, I'd say your light needs to be a tad bit higher. Now problem with that is with a hat on you will get worse results as the shadow from the brim will come right across your forehead. So you can tilt your head up a bit/move the hat brim up or...call this one good.

I had the strobe at the same height as my head. How high up should the strobe usually be when trying to create rembrandt lighting? Should I adjust the strobe 45 degrees higher then my face? I see what you're saying about the hat. I'll try my next shot without the hat.

Originally Posted by 3bayjunkie

Dude! You look just like the old man! You should do an impersonation of him on video. I think you would fool some people. you fooled me with this photo. I thought it really was the old Rocky

What's funny was I wasn't actually trying to impersonate Rocky, it just turned out that way. I was just tired of photographing myself so I started making the most ridiculous looking faces I possibly could. What's ironic though is that the Rocky series was my favorite as a kid, I watched those movies over and over again.

[zona5101]

Originally Posted by Corey Thompson

Thank you for the comments

I had the strobe at the same height as my head. How high up should the strobe usually be when trying to create rembrandt lighting? Should I adjust the strobe 45 degrees higher then my face? I see what you're saying about the hat. I'll try my next shot without the hat.

I'd start at 45 degrees up....so if your eye are on level your light is 45 degrees up from that plane. Your light position off axis (left/right) looks great.

[Corey Thompson]

Thank you for the help and suggestions. I will incorporate your advice into my upcoming week 4 portrait.

[Doug Sundseth]

I think the confrontational expression and pose work well with the centered position you chose here. I would like to see a bit less negative space at the top of the image, but that's easily fixable.

I like the dramatic falloff between key and fill as well.

As noted, the hat brim is limiting your options here. (Hats and glasses; we hates them ... and we wears them, too. )

You probably don't need to perfectly match color temperatures. Either a full-cut CTO or 3/4 CTO should bring your flash to something pretty compatible with 2700K. The easy way to test this is to take photos of your hand in the mixed light and chimp the result. If it doesn't look bad on your hand, it will probably look fine on your face.

[Corey Thompson]

Thanks for the tips. I'll work on ditching the hat for future shots. I'm wanting to start taking different shots that don't involve a black background but I'm still feeling like I haven't perfected this type of shot yet. I'm getting better at balancing the key and fill to my liking to produce dramatic lighting on my face, but there just isnt enough light on the top of my head. Im feeling limited by my gear but I know there are people who take fantastic portraits with just one light. Is it not possible to get my hair exposed better with just one light? I need my reflector for fill on the short side of my face. Is there anything I can do to better expose my hair without launching light grenades with a shoot through or beauty dish?

[Doug Sundseth]

Honestly, the easiest way to fill with a one light shoot is to drag your shutter and use the ambient:

Set your camera to its maximum sync speed (probably 1/200 with that camera, but check if that doesn't work right), then adjust your key light and aperture to get the lit side to the brightness you want. Then dial down your shutter speed until your ambient provides as much fill as you want. (Shutter speed has no significant effect on the light contributed by the flash.)

The only significant trick here is that you normally want to match the color of the flash from 5500K (approx. depending on the flash) to whatever color your ambient light is. If you don't do this, you'll get odd shadow colors that are essentially impossible to fix in post. (Ignore this paragraph if you're shooting in B&W.)

[Corey Thompson]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll have to work on this. I tried dragging the shutter longer to let the ambient fill into the photo in addition to my key light source pointed at me from off camera. The ambient appeared in the photo as desired but I was blurred in the photo. Perhaps I dragged the shutter too long? Should I only drag the shutter to the point where I wont be blurred and then increase the ISO to further compensate?