Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted about Blake who is an intermediate photographer. Blake’s says he took this into the studio as part of the series with this model. He says he was trying for some dramatic lighting and high contrast still soft enough for the lighting to be flattering.
He said that he wanted to go for composed peaceful facial expression here and Blake says she was using a fan on the models hair. But we will talk a little bit more about the set up, that is pertaining to the lighting. Like he used the Nikon V-30016 to 85 zoom and re-zoom to 52 so the effect of the focusing to 78 mm around 80 mm are real nice focusing for this kind of portrait were you doing head and shoulders or head and partial tours. F8 and a zoom 58 and ISL 250 and Blake says any comments on the lighting will be appreciated but he use the soft box on either size of the model that is pretty stick angle. The camera right and the camera left.
So let us talk for a second about the lighting. Since that was a mains question. We can just do a little diagram here and say we have a soft box here and a soft box here, and you really get a sense with that.
You also get a sense of the angle being pretty strip. You see that here because she soft box over here is creating this accent on the outside of the models hair but then it is enough of the angle for there to be a shadow, and between that part of the hair and the face then the light comes back in. You see the specular high light for both of the soft boxes on both sides of the nose; they are on the shadow right in the middle of the nose. So it is really a beautiful specular highlight here and you also see a very secularity over here.
One of the things I loved about the lighting is because it is coming in such an angle. We are getting a quite a bit of filling a form, a bid difference betweens high lights and shadow, and highlights and shadow. And it just keeps happening in the image and it is happening in a way where the lighting pattern is elegant and it is making qualities of line that are happening in the image.
And also I am really enjoying the powerful filling of that. That the lighting is creating in the image, main thing I would say about the lighting here is that, on this side let us talk about this light first. I love everything that this light is doing with the exception of the light on this hand and I love to flag down of a little bit and tone that down. And while we are there let us just talk about this hand. I love to see the hand in a variation wrapping around the arm here. This shape, even that was written kind of beautifully red neck with other parts of the image and it does sort of a really good job of kind of bouncing this part on the diagonal here.
It is a flat space shape, it is very bright and I think that the hand wrapping around here, I might see it; I might not like it at all but I think it would help to do is to try a several things. It would help to break this idea. It would help to sort of make a sort of a cote of parenthesis to the top part of the head here. Now with the finger coming around like this, it would also help to break up these lines. It is pretty straight up and down in the image, one thing I would try here is to bend her arm a little bit. So if she could still hold this post with the shoulder up, said there is a little bit of movement to these lines but the hand wrapping across here help to break that up. And we do it, I think it would really help to sort of to complete the filling of the circle rhyme this area round this area and all of the circular movement is happening in the image. When I look at the light coming from the other side, again I love what is doing in terms of the specular high light on the outside of the hair driving something out.
I do like what is happening to the light right here in this eye, and I love what this soft box over here is doing to the shoulder in the back. There is some really beautiful very settle transitions from highlights to shadow. It is really driving a really powerful filling on the very second dept into this part of the model and the photograph. But what I do not like about with this soft box doing over here is these specs specular high light right here, right now. These two areas are specular of kind a bouncing each other. Red light is even go away, it is to flat space shapes that do not really have much all to do with this part of the portrait. And to me if black is going for this dreamy peaceful kind of thing.
The hair definitely is going a long with that, on the way it has been lift. And her eyes and her mouth are paying hat off. And the shoulder here and the box are definitely playing with that. But then this, this idea to me is starting to take away from it. So what could we do to form a lighting standpoint? This is one where I would start with this soft box over here and flag it of the hand, bringing the hand around and change the angle might get rid of some of this aspect because you know, and quality of light has a lot to do also with just an angle of light to a subject.
If her hand is just a little bit it might not be specular, but I think I would start with the soft box over here and then actually add a thrill right behind or above the camera. Big soft light, play around, and turning it up and down and that would be my starting point. And I love the light to fall off big time over here, maybe it just getting a light in the one eye. Maybe sort of a new lighting pattern on this side of the face and let this fall off, and then you could. If you have enough fill on this part of the box, you could really do what ever you wanted to do in this area. Because it would be low, contrast enough.
You could create all the effects that you see here. It is really hard to come back now, and reattaching and telling this downs and ton this down, particularly working in the color files. So again, we start to having two keys lights here.
I think I might have one, if what where I want to do a photo to create this affects like here maybe an concept like, something like that. So that is my take on the lighting, because we are doing this a little backwards and I just jump right in to talk about lighting. I love this portrait I love what Blake has done here.
Model is stunningly beautiful, she got beautiful hair. Blake lighting is showing the hair off, not only just the hair by itself is beautiful in the image and you using the fan. There is a lot really good rhythm in here. You know the way, this is been frame. The specular highlight here and this beautiful circle if the back here, those two things playing a really beautiful way , the thing here on this shape and playing of the hand here and just as over all feeling that Blake has achieved to your circular movement.
Very, very powerful, and then sort of all rose do really end up leading you back to the main idea in the image. Love the simplicity of the background here, while the things I like about this, besides the lighting one I think about perfect world improvement for this one. I am a fan of using slow focus filters in certain situations on it is really pretty easy to create. This effects in photo shop, you can soot one in the camera, this is so dreamy and when the hair being blowing away or with out sort of a dreamy things and you got the eyes close and looking down and in just a gesture with a hand in the soldier. I personally would take this in a little bit more of a dreamy direction in terms of the filling of flow focus.
This is the kind of thing that can just divide a room right down in the middle. And people can get into a prettier heated thing about the slow focus filter, because you go number one to the whole kind of air brush idea and not keeping it real in kind of reinforcing this stereo type about beauty that is unreal and there is just a lot of reattaches that do not like the slow focus idea. There it takes something away from which a person really is I came in knowing all that, I still did it. I came in and I ton the shadow that is being cost by the strip angle lighting of the dimple on the aging amount. Because I think, it makes go the heaviness to the amount where there is a peaceful white dreamy expression and then I did a big slow focus filter effect and it really changes the way that you look at the image.
I always exaggerate for the Daily Critique because it is a small video and this is on its own layer, so we could turn the capacity down here. You know we can play around with that and now that I am watching this, again after I did the photo shop work I might turn it down to something like that. But I do like softening this up a quite a bit by just using the slow focus filter effect. I came in a darken top lifting corner at the background, I just did not see any need to have that flow of light on the background. I do not think it is helping pay off the expression here, I think it is fooling your eyes sort away from it. And then I added a pretty dramatic lighting effect to the hair to this side, I did that because I am trying to bounce this real high contrast line and sort to keep the eye coming back over to here.
And I feel like this put some more weight on this part of the face, which is my favorite part of t he image. And I think it also creates a little bit more of balance from left to right, and I just came an over all. A kind of halo affect on the background and the hair to push this idea sort of circle going all the way around in the image.
So this is were we started, and this were we will end it up, but I love to hear people’s feed back about what we done here today stunning portrait from Blake. Really beautiful job of using lighting to create dimension. You did really great job here opposing and achieving a sort of feeling that Blake was going for and the studio, I want to say huge thank you to Blake for sharing this beautiful portrait with us on the Mindful Eyes Daily Critique.
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