For this assignment, our instructor wanted us to take what we learned in our Sportrait assignment and work on refining our technique. The directive was to check out lights from the gear cage on campus and plan a shoot. Luckily I have my own gear and decided to continue to familiarize myself with it.
I knew I wanted to do an outdoor portrait and mix open sunlight with strobes. I thought a nice Fall image would work well for this. We’ve had some lovely October days lately and I new an evening Golden Hour at a Bird Sanctuary would be a great location to setup and make some photographs.
I hauled all my equipment out to a bird sanctuary south of town and brought my subject/assistant with me. We had a little bit of wardrobe with so we could try a few different looks.
My first order of business was to make a test exposure in ambient only light to get a feel for what settings I would need to get good light for the background. This would also help me determine if I would need to use High Speed Sync. For the shoot we kept the sun to the subject’s back. Of course with the sun behind the model, her face is cast in shade and without using any external light sources; we loose all detail on the subject.
To counteract the back lighting situation, I used three lights; two Godox AD300 Pros, one as a keyight, one as a fill and a Godox V1 as a hairlight. By looking at the shadows, I could tell we were dealing with hard edge ambient light, so I kept the fill bare to mimic and only used a grid on the hair light to mimic these conditions. The key light was a bit harsh so I decided to add a softbox to it.
These lights were all controlled with a Godox XProC trigger, each light set to its’ own group so I could control the power of each unit independently. Using TTL metering, I set the main light to full power, the fill light 2 stops down to create a nice deep 4:1 or 5:1 lighting ratio. I found myself adjusting the hair light frequently ultimately settling on pushing it a few stops over. I think this is necessary in order over power the sun. I really wanted to get some good separation on our subjects far shoulder.
One of the directives from our Portraiture instructor is to have our subject become part of the background. For composition, I wanted to use this strategy to create a sense of three dimensional space by having a foreground, a midground and a background. The shallow depth of field gives us some out of focus grass in front of our model to serve as the foreground, while the subject is in the midground. The treeline in the back establishes a background. I’m undecided how I feel about the horizon line between the gold grass and the green trees cutting our model’s head in two.
One critique I had from the Sportrait assignment was to avoid hunched over shoulders so I worked with our subject to have a nice tall posture. I believe these creates a healthier and happier photo. Something that I’m always on the lookout for is the position of the model’s eyes. Often times I will direct them to position their head, thinking about which lighting suites which facial structure best. Once I have the head position I want I will have the model follow my finger until I get the eye position I want. I’m looking to avoid too much weird side eye. I love that I got catch lights in both of her eyes.
Head position is tilted slightly towards the light to create a revealing and feminine look.
For our model’s hands I directed her to think first mudra with her index finger and thumb and to bring the remaining fingers towards her palm. This creates a soft pose of the hands as opposed to an aggressive fist.
For post production, I worked with Brushes in LrC to brighten the whites of our model’s eyes a little bit and to the healing brush remove some non-permanent blemishes on her skin. I also used Ira Gardner’s Frequency Separation Actions to soften Sue’s skin texture and even out her complexion in Photoshop. Also in Photoshop; with a darkening layer, I attempted to bring down the highlights in her hands so that aren’t competing with her face for the viewer’s eye. It’s still too bright in my opinion. In order to combat this moving forward I’m will bring the fill light a little higher in order to feather that light away from the hands.
Here’s some outtakes of my bandmates being goofballs:
