Yesterday we had a pretty serious post. The more seriously the post yesterday is, the more normal the post today has to be. Again, it is all about a setup-tutorials. How to get some pretty cool photos by knowing what to do.

Today we will speak about a specific setup and we will also talk about the color temperature. 

Take a brief look at the setup… :-) Very hard this time… but you will get the point :-)… One flash with gel on a boomstand just above the camera. One ringlight in front of the camera, two strobes with dishes on it… 60° angle… and that’s about it…

Take a close look at the camera-settings. They are not really “usual”… one could think that it would be wise to open the aperture a bit more and reduce ISO speed. But trust me, ISO 800 is not that bad at all, but photos with no scharpness in it… ARE!!! 

N.B.: IT IS BETTER TO HAVE A SHARP BUT NOISE PHOTO THAN TO HAVE A TOTALLY CLEAN PHOTO WHICH IS NOT SHARP AT ALL.

And here you go with an overview of the whole setup… :-) Except for the one flash on the boomstand! A more photorealistic overview. :-) For all of you not beeing able to read “my perfectly setup drawings”.

Ok, before we start to talk about the actual setup, have another close look at the final photo.

- click on image to enlarge -

So now it’s time to talk about the setup. You all know the photos, the flashes, the lights and the details. 

We started with the ringlight. The ringlight is a perfect portrait light. It gives you a natural focus on the face, the eyes get a very cool ring and you can reduce shadows because the ringlight produces now harsh shadows on the face.

We then wanted to go on with the some lights to separate the model from the background. But we had a serious problem. The ringflash is to weak compared to the strobes. By just using normal strobes, you would overexpose the whole photo. But we noticed the normal lamps of the strobes. The had the perfect powerlevel. 

But they do had some other results which were not that “nice to have” :-)…

• The light also hit the background which made the whole photo a bit of “blurry”…
• The light had another temperature of color, compared to the DAY-LIGHT of the ringlight, the light is YELLOW/ORANGE.

The solution for the background-problem was fairly simple. We used another light, with two blue gels on it. One gel to change the color, another gel to just dimm the flashlight. The second gel just made the power less. 

The whole flash was set above the model to give a nice round spot.

The second problem was much harder to solve. And finally we solved it, by not doing anything at all. We left the orange color of the two lights. Sometimes it is better not to “fight” an enemy and to life with the problem, than trying to avoid it by all means. 

Color does also have a cool effect. It also separates. 

So, the setup was finish. But if you looked closely to the final photo, you could have noticed the background. There is a change of color in the background and it is not symmetric at all. How did we do that??? We only used one blue flash!!!

The answer is fairly simple. Different color from different lights tend to mix up. The form a new color or just change color! That is what happened here. Take again a close look at the position of the dishes in the background. You can see that they are not symmetric at all. One (on the right hand side) is directed more to the background… this is the reason why the right side of the background gets a bigger change of color… the yellowish light from the strobehead shines on the background and mixes up with the blue light…

This little details belongs to what we already discussed. LIGHTING MINIMALISM… sometimes you don’t really see what changes are done by some small movements or corrections.

Ok, that’s it… What did we learn today? 

1. You can mix different lights with different colors as long as it has a reason to do so. 
2. Small changes are really important… and more important to know!
3. Another way to shoot a portrait.

N.B.: THINK ABOUT DOING THAT SHOOTING WITHOUT FLASHES BUT ONLY WITH NORMAL LAMPS. FROM YOUR DESK OR FROM YOUR LIVINGROOM. YOU JUST NEED SOME LIGHT AND THEN START CONTROLLING THE POWER BY MOVING IT CLOSER TO THE MODEL.

And soon we will speak about mixing flash & AL… As you can see on the image down below… you can mix it! :-)

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