Chi-chi


090117_25-Edit-Edit, originally uploaded by Hartsord.

This is one of my recent photos. It was taken in one of our Parish's conference rooms, and I like it because it shows how easily you can set up a shoot if you know some basics.

First of all, the background is a plain, cream colored wall. I was able to darken it a bit by keeping my main light quite close to the subject (about 2-3 ft in front), and the background about 10 feet behind her. The room was lit by fluorescent lights (which is generally not good), so I reduced its effect by shooting at 1/200th of a second (which affects continuous light, but not the light from a flash). My first set up actually had the subject about 15 ft away from the wall, but I found the background a little too dark; to fix this, I moved everything about 5 feet back towards the wall.

In addition, my initial set up (Vivitar 285HV through 36" umbrella cam left, Sigma EF500 DG Super with snoot camera right for the hair light) also created harsh shadows on her left cheek and neck, so I again moved the entire set up a foot towards the right, and she ended up around 2 ft to the wall, which lightened up her shadow side just right.

A third point in this shot is that the relatively low power of the flashes allowed me to use a large aperture for this, to set up the nice bokeh on this shot.

After that, I added a bit of Orton effect to this: duplicate layer, set to luminosity, gaussian blur, reduce opacity to preference, then mask out the eyes, mouth, and part of the nose. Add just a bit of PARC eyes to the mix (just a little, thank you; I hate it when this effect is overdone), and it's just about done.

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