A Little News

Believe it or not, making beautiful people look beautiful in photos is not as easy as it would seem. I have found it far easier to make people look ugly than to make them look beautiful no matter what their eye appeal is. Basically, it comes down to light. Everyone has seen the difference in Hollywood stars when they are on the cover of a magazine with a well lit portrait and when they are caught in the glaring light of on camera strobes in those tabloid moments. Lighting makes the difference. Okay, makeup artists, stylists, art directors and those cool fans they use on fashion shoots make a little difference too!

Every year, we do a send off party for the reigning Miss Point Mallard as she is getting ready to leave for the Miss Alabama pageant. During this party, the beautiful young lady models her gowns for us to photograph. There is no set, no stylist, no cool fan to blow her outfits around and the lighting is usually just what you carry in with you which, in my case, means a trio of SB strobes. The party is always held in the private home of one of the pageant coordinators so the backgrounds can range from really good to very difficult to work with. Space limitations are always the biggest problem because about all of these folks have nice homes. So there we have the challenges.

Katie Boyd is the reigning Miss Point Mallard and they tell me she has a good chance to become Miss Alabama. I photographed her in three outfits during the send off party this year and I got a couple of shots that are worth talking about. Both are three light photos but there are two different approaches which I will contrast for you. The first photo is my favorite. The red dress, the excellent background and the lovely young lady just make this a really appealing photo for me.

The main light is an SB800 in an umbrella positioned to the camera left, high and at about 65 degrees left of the camera to model line. I had Katie turn slightly toward this light so the angle of the light on her was actually closer to a classic 45 degree position. There is a light positioned very high and behind her to the camera right. It was placed a ceiling level and aimed down to give some separation from the background. Then there was a problem. The high light separated her upper half from the background but the lower portion of her dress blended in and we were losing the foot and leg extended through the slit in her gown.

To solve this problem I positioned a third SB800 on a chair slightly ahead of her and aimed from her waist down. I was getting spill onto the background which was very bad so I used my bag to scrim this light so it was not impacting the background at all. The result you see here.

The second set up was with a different gown and in a different room in the house. With the owners permission we pretty much moved the furniture from her dining room so we could use a small cove in one wall for our background. Katie’s gown featured a low scooped back and I wanted to highlight this feature. The electric blue gown made a nice color combo with the wall color but I needed to light the cove to bring out the color.

The lighting setup for this one uses two umbrellas with SB strobes. The lighting ratio is not quite 2:1 but is comes fairly close with the main light being on the camera left. I collapsed the umbrella on the right so the light fall off was somewhat controlled. You can control how much of the umbrella you collapse by moving the umbrella shaft in or out relative to your flash. This helps you control how much the umbrella closes. You have to be careful with this technique because the light fall off can be fairly dramatic causing you to under light portions of your frame. The third light is just laying on the floor and aimed up. It was set to about 1/32nd power and zoomed to the 85mm setting. This lit the cove with some control on the beam spread.

I left with two photos I was very pleased with and they fed me dinner on top of all that. Very nice indeed!

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.