Building your Exposures

When working with multiple light sources (even two!) its very important to build your photos light-by-light.  It’s not always feasible when there is a time constraint, but when you have the time to do it, or are working with many lights, I think it’s very important to know what each light is doing.  By building your photo light-by-light it makes troubleshooting problems VERY easy because you know what light the error or anomaly is coming from.  My friend Johnny Korthuis needed a headshot for social media and publicity use, so we set up in my living room late at night and built a 5-light setup.  I used the opportunity to show you how I build a complex exposure light by light.

First Up- The Key. We knew we wanted a moody and edgy photo, but something that would still pass in the corporate world if it needed to.  I decided to use my 22″ beauty dish almost straight overhead for it.  I started by making a frame with JUST the key on to make sure the angle, light output, and look was right.

Now this isn’t a good photo. It’s not meant to be. All we’re doing is checking each building-block as we go for light output and angle. It’ll get slowly better. Next up, we add the fill-light.  Now I have this odd beauty-dish-overhead-and-softbox-on-the-ground thing that I’ve never seen anywhere else, but it seems to work for me and I come back to it often as I like the look it gives.  That’s what we’re going to do again here.  I want to check the output of JUST the fill to make sure it’s where I want it to be, so I switched the softbox on the ground to channel two on my pocket wizard, and the camera to match (it’s easier than turning every other wizard off) and made a frame.

Perfect.  Again, the photo isn’t perfect at all, but the output is where I want it, and this source is going to smooth out and compliment the hard, edgy, cool lines we’re creating with the overhead beauty dish. Lets mix them and see where we are:
Awesome. We’re starting to look like we have that “pop” that I like so much from this Frankenstein clamshell beauty dish/softbox setup that I favor. Now we move on to add the “specials”  First up is the backlight to highlight the wall. Remember we’re moving light by light here, and from this point on, we can leave the key and fill ON because the changes will be VERY obvious and won’t affect the exposure we’re set at much.

Looks Good. I’ll have to play with the positioning, grid choice (in this photo its 40 degree), and angle of the backlight but we know we’re getting close. It was a bit tough to get a perfectly circular spot on the wall that matched the look I wanted because we weren’t shooting square to the wall due to the constraints of being in my living room, and not a studio.  Lets add the side/hair lights. This is where the look will really come together!

COOL. This is the look I saw in my head when we started (pretty close anyway!) and now we’re ready to stop goofing around and make the photo we came for. The side lights in this case are bare Nikon Speedlitghts zoomed to 85MM and back-camera-right and left because I ran out of AB800′s.  The positioning of all the sources is in the photo below:
This is the ghetto, goofy-looking setup behind the shiny photo   Speedlights are on my mantle (on the left) and on my lighting bag and a footstool (on the right);  We’ll call them “improvisational light stands”. Beauty Dish is boomed overhead, the big black square in the bottom of the frame is the large softbox on the ground, and the wall-spotting backlight is obvious here.  All we needed for this was a plain-colored background. Remember that there’s a studio where ever you want to have one!  We got johnny dressed, posed, and edited and came out with this as the final frame:
Moral of the story- Build your lighting setups Light-by-Light and you can’t go wrong!

More to come. . .

-Rod