Today I have been playing around with lighting concepts to show off my nice new ESP LTD EC-1000.
Two things really got me fired up for trying these ideas out. The first was a tutorial from DPS on blackening backgrounds in portraits. Pretty solid concept and a really great technique which could help you make quick portraits with little to hand.
The second is one of my favourite photographers, Chad Coombs. There are so many things that make Coombs one of the greatest in the field. unparalled eye for composition, diverse subjects, experimentation, photo manipulation, but for me his greatest aspect is his purpose built custom micro studio and his ability to use confined spaces and somehow make them look even bigger. Plus his setups are just downright dope.
So taking in the examples shown on DPS I began setting up my shot. To start with I used Nikon’s creative lighting system i.e wireless, with my SB600. this was set to full power or 1/1 shooting through an umbrella. I thought this may help with the fact that I don’t actually have a dark background.
As you can see this first shot we are already getting some pretty tidy results. Looking behind the guitar you will notice that the window blind has virtually become solid back. This illustrates the fact that using this lighting technique you can get some cool results and lose your background.
The SB600 acting as our key light has perfectly shown the contours of the guitar, it has picked out the curves in the body and illustrates how the controls are all set into the wood.
I was pretty happy with this shot. But it is 1/125 at f5.6. I really wanted a much lower aperture to lose even more of the background. To do this I decided to lose the umbrella.
Yikes! total wipe out!. But this is great, because now we know we can start closing up that aperture and get it down to the f22 we are after or f32-the furthest the lens goes.
So after dropping the aperture, I have pretty much what I had with the umbrella.
Now I want to pick out some of the shape from the other side of the guitar body.
After messing around with a reflector for a while and getting diddly squat, I figured it was time to add another light in.
A Vivitar 285 again set to 1/1 but this time shooting through an umbrella. This is because I only want it to fill in the left side, give a little more to the full shape of the subject.
So time to put it all together.
but I haven’t got the background I wanted. I have a plan. Because I am only shooting the body of the guitar I can make a tighter crop and get some backdrop effects back in. this is where the inpiration of Chad Coombs comes in. I grab a towel and use som drying racks to create a backdrop.
The towel is red which means I still can’t acheive the originally intended blackout but, you improvise.
And here it is, the final image.
The two lights have provided a more even exposure, but still kept the hard countours and detail. The overal image is brighter, this is because the red backdrop has some bounce properties to it.
The Setup :
Here you can see the SB600 firing bare to the right and the Vivitar 285 through the umbrella on the left. Note the make-shift backdrop. ‘You’re a towel‘.
Closing notes:
Both lights were approximately 3-4ft away from the subject. I had no room lights on, pretty much working with candlelight, which did make focussing a little tricky but in general I think it worked pretty well.
Comments welcomed with open arms.
The Avangelist
