Studio Chronicles?

Last year I wrote a few posts about how I achieved some of my shots in the studio, including the lighting set up and some of the other tools I used. Since I have more of a following of photographers and photography enthusiasts, I think now would be a good opportunity to show two of those tutorials together in one post for #showcase-sunday. I hope that you enjoy this tutorial I have put together and learn a thing or two about shooting portraits in a studio setting. Thanks for stopping by.

chron·i·cle
ˈkränək(ə)l/Submit
noun
plural noun: chronicles

1. a factual written account of important or historical events in the order of their occurrence.

I am going to be trying something different and writing about some of my fun studio shoots that I am doing and give some insight on how it is accomplished. I have a studio shoot planned for this weekend, and I am going to get a little more detailed with that one by taking some pictures of the lighting set up, but hopefully explaining this set up will still make a bit of sense.

For the set up, I placed the key light almost to the side of my subject where it would have given a side lighting effect, and then moved it forward a little, so it wasn't full side lighting. I raised it up above my subject and angled it down at about 45 degrees.

I chose to use a soft beauty dish because it gives a nice soft light that wraps around your subjects features. When using a beauty dish you want to place the light about the distance of the diameter of the dish to your subject's head or whatever you are photographing. This can make shooting full body shots somewhat difficult becaue the light should be pretty close and it starts to fall off quickly across your subject's body. But the look can be pretty dramatic when it does.

^{Photo taken by me @derangedvisions}

^{Photo taken by me @derangedvisions}

Overall, I am really happy with how the images all turned out. I am really enjoying shooting more in the studio. The thing I like most about it is that you are in complete control of the environment and how all of the light gets shaped and the intesity of the light.

^{Photo taken by me @derangedvisions}

Double Side Light

^{Photo taken by me @derangedvisions}

So this is probably one of my favorite lighting techniques. You can pull off some pretty dramatic effects with this.

You can choose to use beauty umbrellas or grids on the end of your lights for an even more dramatic effect to your light. The grids will focus the light more on your subject, whereas the umbrellas will wrap more light around your subject, but will also cause more spill over on the background, so if you want the background to go black, you will want to aim the lights at an angle so light is not hitting your backdrop very much. Or you can pull your lights and subject forward more from the backdrop if space allows it.

This is what the set up looked like. Now if I were using the grids instead of the umbrellas, I would turn the lights in towards my subject's face because the grids would focus the light on him and not aim any of it at the backdrop, depending on the grid that you are using.

^{Photo taken by me @derangedvisions}

One of the cool things about this light set up is that you can acheive some really different looks by just having your subject turn their head. This shot above was a direct shot looking forward with me standing directly in front of him whereas the very first image is a with me in the same position and him turning his head to the right slightly.

You can also keep your subject looking forward, but then you as the photographer move and shoot from different angles and then that will affect how the looks in the image.

Thank you

I hope that you enjoyed these tutorials. Thank you for checking them out. You are awesome!