A Simple Beauty Lighting
For my photosession with Laura back in October, I chose a simple lighting setup which is common for beauty productions. The trick for such productions is to have a very good looking model with a great skin and a good attitude: Laura matched all the requirements.
Here the lighting setup. It consists of placing a Profoto beauty dish with a grid slightly above the model, not too high. The black gobo on the left adds some shadow to the right part of her face giving the picture more structure and dimension. Without the gobo the picture would look too flat.
Do you use a beauty dish? Do you have any samples?
P.S: Here is an update after reading Oscar’s comment. I do not use a light meter, instead I use the histogram on my camera to ensure that I am not loosing any details on the photo. Here you have more information about the picture. Hope it helps.
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Hi Luis!, I would like to ask you two questions
First: What f you usually use in these photos? ¿f16, f8…?
Second: when taking the final reading with the meter, for example, with the light meter in front of the model with the bubble out, if the light meter indicates f16, Do you shoot at f16 or stop +1,?
(Many times I tried to photograph the white skin approaching the limit of dynamic range but not burn, but when viewing the Raw, the brightest parts look strange, I get better result when shooting with a normal brightness and then modified it in lightroom.)
Thanks!
Hi Oscar,
here my answers, hope they help you
1- In these photos I usually experiment a little bit. I do not use a light meter since I like choosing the f value on my own. For this photo it was f10 1/125. Sometimes for studio portraits I might use a large aperture to get a nice depth of field. But in this photo I did not want it.
2- I do not use a light meter. I work by reading the histogram on the camera. I try out different lighting settings and always check the histogram to make sure the complete dynamic range is included in the histogram.
For me it is also important not to burn anything and not to loose detail. The histogram is the best indicator. If your histogram is good, then post-processing will have the best quality.
I have updated my blog post to include the information you asked for. I hope it helps!
Luis
[...] January I posted two lighting setups involving only one beauty dish with a grid. You can read them here and here. Last Sunday I used the beauty dish again and mixed it with a snoot to illuminate the [...]