Playing with light

Last night saw the return of Scarlett Fox to JFYP Studio for a group shoot and an opportunity for us to experiment with the lighting.

We started by using some gels and opinions were varied as to the resulting images. In fairness time only allowed for us to try out the blue gels and clearly we need to explore the possibilities in much greater depth but one thing that I discovered from this brief look was the detail and contrast you get when you convert the images to black and white. Being someone who often lives in a black and white world this is something I certainly want to explore further.

We also looked at the effects of a spotlight on the background and here you can see how the editing has brought about a totally different look in the two images with the colour image giving a much softer look and a less defined spot on the background.

 

Keep the same lighting setup but move to 3/4 shots and you end up with a very modern high key fashion look.

 

I do like my shadows and so we moved to a very simple setup with a single light and a reflector. Moving the position of the light, or indeed moving your own position, changes where the shadow falls and moving the model forwards or backwards will have the effect of lightening or darkening the background. Again the intention here was to produce harsh, edgy images with attitude, something I know Scarlett is very good at.

We started out with the light pretty much straight in front of Scarlett with the resulting heavy shadow almost directly behind.

 

 

and then we moved the light to the side for a much moodier, aggressive look and notice how much darker the background now appears.

 

 

And finally a big thanks to Sue Trout who you can always rely on to bring a large bag full of props with her. On this occasion she brought along an illuminated sphere and so we moved to a black background and some art nude. Of course, to get the best effect, we needed to move to continuous lighting as flash would have killed the light from the sphere and so it was up with the iso and a wide open aperture to capture our final set of images of the evening.

 

So that was it, another enjoyable evening at the studio and a variety of images and as I always keep saying don’t discount Group Shoots. There are plenty of them taking place up and down the country. They will all have different formats and some will be better than others but the one thing they will all give you is a chance to meet other people and share ideas.

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