Sunday 14 February 2010

TUTORIAL #2 - Middle Ages Portrait.

Well, this is my second tutorial and in this one I will talk about one of my commercial shoots for TONI&GUY Moscow.


Equipment and settings:
- Canon 5D, Canon 24-70 f/2.8 L USM, 70 mm, f/8, 1/100, iso 160
- 4 x 750Ws heads
- boom
- 3 soft boxes 1mx1m
- 60º grid reflector with honeycomb
- 2 black flags
- white fabric 3mx2,5m
- portable background support


The idea was to imitate classic painted portrait and one of the biggest problems was to simulate day light in the studio. For that reason I bought a 3m (height) by 2.5m (width) piece of white fabric (#3) and put it on a portable background support system. Behind the fabric I positioned 2 heads with 2 1mx1m soft boxes (#1 and #2) one above another. The centre of #2 was located on the model’s shoulders level and was half stop less than #1; both were about half meter away from the fabric. This complicated construction’ purpose was to maximize the softness of the main source of light.

It was the hair shoot and I decided to add another source of light – just above the model’s head – soft box #4 with the boom, as it is shown on the scheme, so that the surface of diffuser was parallel to the floor.

If your studio is not big to locate the model far enough from the wall it might cause lots of reflection light coming from the opposite side of your lighting set-up; I wanted to avoid that hence added the black flag #7 on the right side so it keeps the contrast on the model.

Taking in account again the small size of the studio, I had to place another black flag #6 to hide the background from the main source of light to keep it black but placed another head #5 with 60º grid reflector and honeycomb to create a gradient on the background just on the right side of the final picture.

To make the background look like a canvas I shot a piece of grey peeling wall, placed it as a new layer above the existing one in Photoshop with the Overlay mode and then played with layer mask and opacity to get necessary amount of texture.

2 comments:

  1. thank you Mr Alexey :))
    Those look really good and I would love to try it myself oneday :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love it! Thx for that! We want more! ;)

    ReplyDelete