How I shot it: Sonya

Portrait sessions indoors can often turn out quite similar, with a plain background and soft shadows with everything super crisp. This time I thought I would experiment with slightly harder shadows and I think the pictures turned out quite well as a result.

You can see the full gallery here or keep reading for more info on how I shot these photos.

[box_grey]Equipment & the room[/box_grey]

For this shoot I used my Nikon D700 with the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 and the Nikon 50mm f1.4.

Most photographers recommend using a lens with a longer focal length for portraiture because the effect of a telephoto lens is compression which flatters the face. In addition, using a wider lens often distorts the face unless you put your subject in the center of the frame and then crop later. I don’t like doing this because it is a waste of pixels. Unfortunately this is not always possible due to size limitations and this was the case here due to the size of the room. Most of these shots are taken at the 70mm end of the telephoto lens which is just about long enough to get rid of any major distortion.

[box_grey]Lighting technique[/box_grey]

I like to work on location most of the time and so I’m not a fan of carrying around huge equipment. For this shoot I decide to experiment with slightly harder light and used a small flash softbox (the LumiQuest Softbox LTP) as a key light combined with the Orbis Ring Flash around the lens for fill flash.

You get ‘hard’ light when the light source is small. Because the light source is small, it illuminates your subject from fewer angles. This means that little imperfections in the skin, e.g. pimples, are only being lit from one side. This makes them stand out because a tiny shadow is created on the other side. If you want to get rid of the imperfections, you can use a larger light source (like an umbrella or a softbox), or you can move the light source you are using closer so that it appears larger to your subject. Alternatively, you can try and fill in the shadows on the other side by using a reflector or a fill light.

I knew that using the small flash softbox would create a relatively harsh light, and I am not a big fan of holding up reflectors, so this is why I picked up the Orbis. This was my first opportunity to use it and I think it performed really well as you can see in the pictures above.

[box_grey]Favourites[/box_grey]

The weird ‘fake’ shadow

A few people have looked at this image and told me that it’s been overdone in Photoshop. What? There’s no Photoshop here! That shadow around her is an effect of the ring flash. This happens because the light comes from every angle around the lens.

What’s slightly different about this shot however, is that if you look at a photo taken with just ring flash, there will be no shadows on the face or anywhere else. I don’t think that looks so great, because no shadows means no depth and everything ends up looking a bit flat.

So I found that to keep the ring shadow effect, but to stop her face looking like a pancake, I had to combine with the small softbox to create some shadows on her face. The small flash (an Olympus FL36) was on a light stand about 45 degrees to camera left and slightly above eye level. It was RF triggered and manually set to 1/16 power. This produced a decent amount of shadow on her face. I then used the ring flash with my Nikon SB900 flash via TTL with the flash exposure compensation at -1.0ev to fill in the bits that were too dark and to produce the fake looking shadow on the wall.

Overall this shot took less than 2 minutes. If I wanted to recreate this effect in Photoshop it would probably take a bit longer than that.

Depth of field

This is a fairly standard portrait, lit with the softbox pulled in really close to her (i.e. just out of frame) to make the light source seem as large as possible. This produces soft shadows. I used the ring flash again, with the flash compensation at -1.7ev just to fill in the shadows. I moved her further away from the wall at the rear so there was no shadow being cast.

For this one, I used the 50mm f1.4 which has a large aperture. This means you can blur the foreground and background, but it also means you have to be very precise with where you focus. I shot this at f1.4 and was careful to select her right eye as my focus point. If you look carefully you can see that the hair in front of her face and her neck and shoulders are blurred. This is called a shallow depth of field and is what makes the image look like it is popping out of the screen.

Different background

I kept the 50mm lens on here but changed the aperture to f8 so that everything stayed in focus. The lighting was slightly different. I only used the small softbox, with the flash connected to the camera with a TTL cord. I had her lie on the floor and placed the flash on the floor pointing towards her face, just outside the frame at the upper left of the image.

You can see that the shadows are a lot harsher here and that’s because the light source is further away from her and therefore is a lot smaller from her perspective. The side effect of this is that the textures and details on the floor really stand out and make for a slightly different feel to the image.

[box_grey]

See the full gallery

[/box_grey]