Studio Portrait

I set up one head with 1200 Ws and the big white diffuser disk. I placed the head at about 45 degrees on both axes. I was shooting at 1/250 and f 16 and 100 ISO. I think that I should have used less power in the head because I had plenty of light to work with and it may have been more comfortable to my subject. I liked how the images from this setup came out, although I feel like a lot of them look like mugshots. I still am not comfortable with being in control of what the subject does.




For my multiple-light setup I tried to be more creative. I first set a head with 800 Ws on a floor stand and pointed it through the back of a chair. I wanted to get the shadows from the chair to give the background some depth. I then took a reading on the background and found that the correct exposure for it was 1/200 at f8. After knowing what exposure I wanted on the background I set up the other lights (by distance to subject) to correspond to the background exposure. I placed the key light (1200 Ws) in a large softbox and put it on the left side of the subject at around 60 degrees. I set a reflector at about the same place on the right side of the subject for fill light. I then put a 200 Ws head in a snoot and aimed it at the back of the subject’s head from behind for a hairlight. I think the setup worked almost how I wanted it to, except I had problems with making the hair light show up. I think I might have needed to make it brighter, or bring the subject out further from the background to get a better angle. I chose this image for my selects.