During a day of quiet reflection and generally just wegging out on the sofa browsing my favourite photography sites, I came across a post about shooting portraits in a home studio.

The TS (thread starter) wanted advice about which type of studio lighting lamps she should get to get started shooting portraits at home.

That inspired me to take some portraits of my own…

First of all, here’s the setup,

setup_portrait_2010_01_01

After setting up the Walimex light stand and shoot through umbrella, with the Canon 430 EX II flash mounted to the Cactus V4 trigger I started taking several exposures. I used the Canon 70-200mm f:2.8 L USM lens mounted on the Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod.

I placed the subject with his back against a big window to blow out the background as  much as possible… the poor mans Hi-Lite.

The flash was set to 1/16 power as a starting point. From here I could go up or down in power. I placed the umbrella as close to the subject as possible to get the softest light available.
The next thing was to get the exposure I wanted. I knew I wanted a fairly shallow depth of field so that meant keeping the aperture down.

Oh, and here’s some basic info for ya:

The lower the f: number, the more light you let in, the less flash power you need to light your subject.

Dial up the f: number and you let in less light, the more light you consequently need, the more flash power you need to light your subject.

The background of course is entirely lit by the shutterspeed.

I ended up changing my idea about the depht of field though, it was just too shallow. The problem was that my eyes were in focus, but my ears weren’t.

So I lowered the aperture (increased the f: number) to get a larger depth of field, but I had to lower the shutterspeed to keep the background over exposed, to get that “blown out” effect.

This resulted in shutterspeeds as low as 1/20.

I created a gallery to show you some of the photos that lead up to the final picture below.

(I just love vignetting in a portrait, in any photograph when it comes down to it actually, it keeps the viewers eyes focused on what you want them to look at.)

final_portrait_2010_01_01 Anders_BW_portrait_2010_01_01

One thing though, I’m really influenced by Nicolai Brix, when it comes to the B&W conversion, you could say I’m copying him…

I’m also really beginning to like this idea with over exposing the image slightly, It just gives it a really cool look.

Related posts:

  1. what did I learn from this shoot?
  2. Understanding studio lighting + update to the “free video tutorial” page
  3. Flash Gordon, or??
  4. Buying a new lens – Canon 70-200 f:2.8 L USM