Portrait in a living room question
Patrick L.
know how to set the lights on the subject, but I'm thinking I should put
lights in the background, so the background is not underexposed. This is
their living room, and their surroundings, I'm thinking, are probably
important, too. I would want to position them in the middle of the room,
don't want a wall to be close to the subjects (due to unwanted reflections
or shadows).
I have two extra lights, what is the best way to do this? With soft boxes?
How about just putting a cloth bonnet over the reflectors? How about
bouncing the lights off the ceiling, without diffusion? How should I meter
the background lights, at half the output of the key light? Same?
Patrick L.
kennyc
meter and make sure the background is at least within 2 stops preferably 1
stop under.
k.
"Patrick L." <nice...@ifyoucangetit.com> wrote in message
news:SKwtb.1579$sb4...@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net...
zeitgeist
> If I'm doing a family portrait in their living room, and using monolights,
I
> know how to set the lights on the subject, but I'm thinking I should put
> lights in the background, so the background is not underexposed. This is
> their living room, and their surroundings, I'm thinking, are probably
> important, too. I would want to position them in the middle of the room,
> don't want a wall to be close to the subjects (due to unwanted reflections
> or shadows).
You are right to place the family towards the middle of the room instead of
up against the wall, but the main reason isn't cause of the shadows, its so
you SEE the livingroom as a background instead of bits and pieces of frames
and lamps poking out of people's heads and corners of the image.
>
> I have two extra lights, what is the best way to do this? With soft
boxes?
> How about just putting a cloth bonnet over the reflectors? How about
> bouncing the lights off the ceiling, without diffusion? How should I
meter
> the background lights, at half the output of the key light? Same?
>
>
what I like to do is see what light in coming in the room, if you are lucky,
you have upper middle class clients with a nice modern cathedral ceiling
home you can sometimes use the archecturally designed natural light, maybe
need a bit of fill.
however, the chances are, if they have a perfectly nice photographic
situation in their home, well they probably also have a nice view which they
want you to use as the background, (nightmare situ)
most likely the folks have a typical squarish house with stuff in all the
corners and walls. If you are lucky you will have white walls, so just
place a flash on the side out of camera view and just blast a wall so it
bounces in the appropriate direction, no need for softboxes, most mono
lights have enough power to handle the bounce.
frame the image so there are few cropped objects in the background, If a
large frame or lamp is in the image, either show all of it or get rid of it.
yes, you could put a flash head behind them to keep the background from
becoming a black hole, however, I prefer to have the subjects faces seem
like the brightest most attention getting thing you see when you look at the
image, white walls tend to distract, especially with part of a frame in one
corner.
here's an ideal situ, you shoot from one room, say the entrance, or the
kitchen/dinning room, and you place a flash in the corner out of sight, the
doorway or wall acts like a scrim or gobo to shield the lens from the flash,
the flash bounces in the white walled corner giving you an umbrella 8 - 11
feet tall and wide. chances are you don't even need a fill. If the walls
are sponged and dappled in violent strange designer colors then you can
either tape white paper, or sheets, or use an umbrella, preferably a 6
footer.
also, and this is a weird one, if the couch and chair, and tables are all
dark, with a dark floor, what happens is you have this shot with a bright
white top half (ceiling) and dark black hole bottom half. I knew a guy who
did interiors for architects and designers, he would place a flash head
under the coffee table and often would give it multiple blasts cause that
shadow under there is a black hole, its amazing how much light gets sucked
out of the image. Frankly he would flash enough light to seem like a
special effect for a movie about aliens or radioactive blobs coming to eat
the co-stars. But it did give a more balanced image density top and bottom.
However, in this instance he was trying to feature the furniture and didn't
want the corner behind the coffee table recede into a coal mine.
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