articles/Lighting/gofire-page2
Published 01/12/2013
Lotte's hair is a fantastic red tone anyway which gave us the fire inspiration in the first place. As the make-up started to take shape and hair pieces were added in it was time to get going again and put the lighting into place.
I wanted the lighting to be crisp and clear. The make-up was matt and so would take hard light. This I felt would bring out the contours in the hair and enhance the pale tonality of Lotte's skin and her blue eyes. So I reached for my trusty Elinchrom Quadra Rangers and chose three of them. The first was my key light and fitted with a beauty dish. The dish has a silver inner and I used a silver diffuser dish in the centre. With a beauty dish there is always the option of putting a sock over the whole thing to soften the light but I chose not to, the softness induced would spoil the effect I was going for. Shooting on my old faithful 70-200mm lens meant I could go for shallow depth of field at f2.8 or max sharpness at f22, or of course an intermediate point between these two extremes. I went for f22 to really punch out every detail. Using hard light and f22 can be punishing for some model's skin but Lotte has a great complexion plus the make-up was properly applied to even any imperfections. The beauty dish was set onto a boom arm around 3ft in front of her, high and angled down. The angle and position were chosen so as to give good even illumination across her upper torso, shadowing under the jaw line but with light into the eyes.
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