In my last post, I tried to impress one or both of you with big words like "specular highlight". These pictures are all about that. At the American Girl Doll Store last weekend (pictures to be shown in a post about white balance, perhaps?), I saw backdrops in the photo booth that had a bright spot in the middle, and more color near the edges. I think what they were trying to replicate with those backgrounds is this technique... but they cheated their way into it unnecessarily. Maybe it was because they're used to giant professional lights at nice even angles or they always use flashes (gasp) ON the camera. Who knows. I did it with a flash hanging from a Gorilla Pod hanging from a curtain rod in my kitchen.
To get it done, you just point light at/near the person with a flash that is set up in a way that will cause a reflection of that flash on the wall behind them. Then you put the person between the camera and that reflection.
No offense to Cheyanne, but Kelly is a much better model at this point. She will move an inch if I ask her to. Cheyanne will either not move or move four feet. She thinks it's cute. I'm still deciding. But to show off the skills of the "months-old" photographer, Kelly is a better bet. You can either go for the halo effect like the top picture, or go for something a little more unbalanced and "contrasty"... like this:
Jackie's not a big fan of dark pictures. I'm fighting it, but I like harder shadows and a little less exposure. There's something deeper about that look that makes me want to look at it longer. Just me? Maybe I just don't have the skills yet to do things subtly. We'll see. Either way, I love the fiddling that goes with getting the flash off the camera.
When i was being a photographer in a studio, we got that light-on-the-wall-behind look by putting a light behind the subject pointed at the wall, which would flash when the picture was taken. Except usually we would put filters on them to make them fancy colors.
ReplyDeleteSo was it like a 3 light setup? One on the wall and two on the person? ...and did you feel like you had good "control" over the light that way? For instance... where the bright spot was, how bright it was, the shape of the "halo", etc.
ReplyDeleteYep. I did. If you point it up, it's more spread out, if you put it too close it looks like a spot, if you point it at the back of their head instead of the wall, you get the backlit look.... I liked it.
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