Not to say that Sandy is a lemon … she was stunningly beautiful on her wedding day! But the room in which she got ready left a little to be desired. But no matter what, never lose sight of the basic rules of lighting! A few post-processing tricks helped but the key is to start with the best possible image. Don’t expect to save an iffy image in Photoshop.
Just got done doing some head shots for Ian Walsh. Ian is an incredible musician/songwriter/singer/performer from Hockessin, Delaware and will be part of the soundtrack to Moondance Alexander starring Don Johnson. Oh, and he’s only 18.
We started the session with some more typical headshots that casting people like to see but I felt compelled to move into something a little more moody. I used just the quartz modeling light from my Speedotron head with a 7″, 30-degree grid for the main and light coming in through my studio windows as the background. I color balanced for the hot light and let the daylight go blue. It provided just enough separation with a little blue-tinted hairlight thing going on. The whole thing could also be done easily and quickly on location with a hand-held video light.
I hope incredible success doesn’t go to Ian’s head because this guy is going to be big!
I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about this image from people that want to know what I did to catch such a lucky break on the lighting. Well, it wasn’t pure luck. But I did take some steps to ensure that I’d get lucky! This setup is typical of my reception lighting in that it uses two lights. One is a small lighsource (a Q-flash behind the couple used as a backlight) and a very large, broad lightsource as a main light (my on-camera EX-580 pointed at the wall to my rear-left).
Click for larger version
The Q-flash was set to 1/16 power and my on-camera flash was set to 1/8 power. I got those numbers by doing a little testing with an assistant before the reception started. I wanted the backlight to be very subtle and just give a little separation between the couple and the background. I know that a lot of guys will advocate using the equipment’s automatic settings and I do when the situation is right. But in this case, with multiple lights, I didn’t want the camera’s meter to be fooled by any light spilling over from the Q-flash.
My camera was set to ISO 800, f4.0 @ 1/60 second to catch some ambient light. Here is my original image.
And here it is with a slight temperature adjustment, a little corner-burning and a curves adjustment.
Next time we’ll look into a really quick way to use multiple lights to make the rest of the reception really pop! Oh, and special thanks to Kevin Kertz for putting together the cool, layered Photoshop lighting diagram that he allows anyone to use for free.