My second year of 365 Days is quickly becoming a vehicle for daily lighting practice. With the exception of one photo, every shot I’ve taken so far has involved off-camera lights in front of the red wall. I’ve used similar lighting setups for the past few shots making only slight adjustments to change specific details in the photos. It’s been a great exercise for me and has allowed me to experiment a bit to see what I can pull off with each lighting scheme.
The most recent setup I’ve been working with is a 3-light combo that is almost a full wrap-around. I have one light on either side of me and one light directly behind me, all of them at about head height. With the camera, it all works out to be a cross pattern setup, which you can see in the diagram below.
Working with this lighting setup has been fun. Because I’m using bare flashes in close quarters, the highlights and shadows are pretty harsh, creating much more contrast than I normally have in my portraits. Also, with the bare flashes, I have much tighter beams of light to direct exactly where I want them. I know I could have snooted the flashes, but I was working close enough that adjusting the zoom head settings was enough (85mm zoom at about 3′ away is plenty tight).
With a flash at either side, I had to be careful how I positioned myself between them. Stand too far forward, and there would be no light on my face. Stand too far back, and there be too much light on my face and odd shadows along the center line. However, once I got the positioning right, the highlights and shadows formed interesting patterns. I also managed to get really neat catchlights and glows in my eyeballs from the hard side-lighting.
Using a similar setup, I was able to create two additional self-portraits that were slightly different. For the image on the left above, I moved the side lights to within a foot of my face to blow out the highlights a bit. The glow in my eyes is also intensified. For the image on the right above, I rotated the backlight to face the wall and stepped back a few inches so more the side lights would hit my face. In both cases, the lights and camera were in the cross pattern from the diagram and power levels on the flashes were about the same.
You can click through the individual photos for more specific lighting information.
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