Pages

▼

Monday, June 25, 2012

Lighting African American on black background


This is one of my favorite photos that I have ever made. I think the model brought as much to this session as I did lighting her.

I love her hair, the turtle neck and her wonderful skin and smile.

Simplicity is what makes this work so well.  You need to have the background far away from the soft boxes.  There is easily 10 feet from the model to the background.  So the amount of light hitting the subject drops off pretty quickly and what little light is hitting the background isn't enough to register in the photo.

She is around f/8 on the Mamiya RZ 6x7 camera system. I was using a 100-200mm zoom lens and shooting with Provia 100 transparency film.  I didn't know how good it was until I got the film back from the lab a day or so later.

Sure I shot a test shot. I shot that with a Polaroid back using Fuji's Polaroid film.

at

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:46 PM

    Great advice Stanley.

    I am not a fan of the ubiquitous "full frontal" lighting. It's flat and boring.

    This adds depth, character, and texture.

    Thanks for the tips.

    I have an assignment coming up where this will come in hand.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown6:27 AM

    Thanks Pablo Conrad.

    ReplyDelete

All comments are reviewed.This is done primarily to eliminate spamming. Please be patient, I maybe on assignment and unable to review right away.

But to increase meaningful conversation, sometimes it’s necessary to reduce the not-so-meaningful bits. Here are the kinds of things we’ve been deleting in recent posts. Please avoid these types of comments:

One-word comments like “Cool!” or “Thanks!” While we appreciate the congrats, we’d love to hear more about what exactly you love, and (even more importantly) why.

Shameless self-promotion. Comments that contain links to your site within the body or otherwise encourage folks to visit your blog are a no-no. If you’d like to increase traffic to your blog, there are other places than here to do that.

Multiple comments by one author. We’re glad you want to be engaged, but please give others a chance to speak, too.

Really long comments. Let’s just say that if you need to take more than three breaths to read your comment, it’s probably too long.