What’s Your Preference?

Hatch1921 · #1 (**permalink**) 05-06-2011, 09:28 AM

Chelsea was just around her 35th week of pregnancy when we photographed her maternity session. She did a great job and this is one of my favorites from the session.

Here is a crop from the image above. You can see the catch lights hitting her eyes and you can also see the how the hair light is creating separation of her black hair from the black background

The Diagram

How it was shot

This was setup in living room, the space was about 20×18 which gave us enough room to capture the shot you see here. For the background we shot everything on black. You really can’t go wrong with black or white. Solid backgrounds give you a lot of headroom in post to come up with creative cropping. From 10×20 layouts to card designs, you have a lot of flexibility. I’m not against multicolored backgrounds, but to me, less is more. My thought process is the subject should be the focus in the image, not the background. Keeping things simple helps put the focus back on the subject.

For the lighting the main light was the Chimera 54×72 super shallow soft box on an Elinchrom 600rx monolight. The box was rotated to a horizontal position to give the most amount of coverage over Chelsea and the fabric. In the first test shots I noticed her hair, being dark, was getting lost with the background. Every thing else was looking good up to this point.

A second Elinchrom 600rx with a 12×50 Westcott strip box was added. I used my boom to place the light up and over the top of her head. When setting up a hair light, it’s important to pay attention to the placement of the light. If the light is hitting too far forward, the nose and forehead will show hot spots. Place the light too far back and you miss the hair. Typically I try to set the hair light about 1/3rd to 1/2 stop higher than the main light. This all depends on hair color. You do not want to over expose the hair. The idea is to bring a little attention to the hair in this scene while creating separation of the hair from the background.

The main light was about 6-7 feet from Chelsea, a few feet off the ground on a normal stand and slightly angled. The hair light was about 1 1/2 – 2 feet above her head.

The material was clamped to another light stand to get the shape you see in the photo

Keep in mind, like all the diagrams I have posted, these are just starting points. Nothing is set in stone. There are so many variables and you will have to work through them to get the results you are looking for in your own images. Hopefully this will help as a starting point.

Camera Settings
Manual Mode
1/160 th a sec
ISO 100
F/8

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for taking to the time to make it this far.

Hatch
Lighting Guides

zona5101 · #2 (**permalink**) 05-06-2011, 11:57 AM

Great shot, excellent lighting. I dig your lighting blog. That shot of Denise (4/26/2001) is wonderful. It is tremendously helpful to have the lighting diagrams and set-up explanations. Thank you for that!

Hatch1921 · #3 (**permalink**) 05-06-2011, 03:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zona5101

Great shot, excellent lighting. I dig your lighting blog. That shot of Denise (4/26/2011) is wonderful. It is tremendously helpful to have the lighting diagrams and set-up explanations. Thank you for that!

Many thank Zona5101

Glad you found them useful.

Thanks again
Hatch