The "Right Light"

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Hello everyone! Glad to see you made your way back again. The shot above was for one of our clients that wanted to do something special for her boyfriend for Valentines day. She came down to the studio, and we took a series of photos for her to box and give to him on V-day. While there were some risque shots in the mix, I really enjoyed this image more than any other. I think it's my attention to eyes that draws me into this image. Eyes seem to tell a story, more than any other feature of the body. Looking into someones eyes is like looking into their soul.

To create this shot I used a beauty dish above the camera a soft box camera left, and a couple lights to knock the background totally white. Hit the jump to see a little more about this setup....

So here is a diagram showing where I had things:
Click on the image to see it full screen

As you can see, the subject is sitting square with the camera, what you can't see is the posing table that she is resting her elbows on. There is an adjustable posing table just out of frame below her elbows that gives her something to relax on.

I mentioned earlier that I was using a beauty dish. This isn't a new modifier for us, but I really haven't spent a whole lot of time working with it. Either it didn't work for the look I was after, or it just didn't happen to be my choice of modifiers at the time. In this shot I had it on a boom above my head and thus above the camera. There are a couple of things that I like about the beauty dish. First, it puts a beautiful catch light in the subjects eyes. It really makes them POP. Second is the softish quality of light that it puts out on the subject's face. It isn't quite as soft as a softbox, but it still isn't as hard as a strait on flash. It's somewhere in between, and I like that.

The other lights in this setup are equally as important to this shot as the beauty dish. I had the softbox to the left set as fill. It was one stop less than the beauty dish. This creates shadows on her right cheek.

The background lights are set two stops above the main(beauty dish) This makes the background go completely white since we are exposing for the beauty dish.

Not much in the way of post processing, just a little smoothing and sharpening.

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