This week I was in the studio with Elena Sophie and Thorsten as I wanted to have some new material to blog. Most the stuff I have been shooting over the last 6 months has either been private shoots or product shoots, so my own personal ranting and raving (aka blog) was neglected over this period. My concept for the shoot was a minimalist lighting look with one 60x80cm soft-box in close and if needed 1 other light source.
My original idea was to shot a Monotone but I liked the coloured versions so much that I ended up doing very little black and white conversions in my post production. We uses a black corset and top hat as the outfit basis and set against a black background. Latter we played around with a few accessories from my props cupboard and a ring light.
This was basically what I had in mind when planing the shoot
My key light was in very close to Elena in fact I actually had to edit the soft-box out of some of the photos it was in so close the whole shoot it was camera right. As her right side disappeared into the black background I added a beauty dish with a honey comb behind her (camera left) to add a bit of separation (rim light) from the background.
Although I was very happy with the look of the black and white images I found the colour seemed to have a bit more kick especially with the feathers and skin tones. Post production was very quick and simple, as the raw files were almost where I wanted them. After selecting about 40 images from the shoot, I developed the first shot from each set-up/style in Lightroom (with minor adjustments e.g contrast, clarity and vignette and preformed a sync so each image had the same adjustments. Next a made a few virtual copies of select images and applied a few different presets that had a slight retro look.
To break up the style and look I used a ring light and spot light (with red gel) in the middle of the shoot. We shoot like this for about 15-20 minutes just so we had another totally different look before going back to the original set up.
Leave a Reply