Three Lights On Axis? Yup!

Had a portrait to shoot this morning, and scouted a location that was on a set of stairs.  We spotted these cool blue background pieces, and wanted to use them as the background for the photo. That would mean shooting UP on my subject from two landings down. My first thought was to throw up an Octa on-axis from the landing above, and call it done. Seems simple enough!  My first issue was going to be the angle at which the source was coming in. If I had my Octa on a lightstand on the above landing, it would be FAR too steep an angle, and we’d make a pretty lady look very scary. No Good. I used to shoot a lot of remote cameras when I worked more heavily in journalism, and a Magic Arm is a mandatory tool for remote cameras, but It will hold a light Just as easily, and I could clamp on to the handrails, and get my light BELOW the stairs to ease the steep angle a bit. Game on.


Great, so we’ve got the Octa Hung, and hopefully at a good angle for some flattering light. Lets see what it looks like.

Not Bad. Would work in a pinch, but I think there’s some room for improvement. I had the idea to put a gridded light two landings above (4 above the shooting position) to accent the background a bit. Grabbed another AB800, threw on a 10 Degree grid because I wanted a SMALL spot, didn’t want any spill onto my subject, and the light was going to be a ways back.

Lets take a Look at what we’ve got now-

Looks Cool!  So in my mind, setup is finished pending a few flash-output tweaks that I know I’ll require once my subject arrives. My subject was Janet Platz, a U of L Education Faculty Alum who is being featured in an upcoming publication. We got her set in front of the camera, and shot with the two-light setup:

Uh-Oh. Well for one, I’m under by a stop, but that’s easy to fix, but more importantly, This is still some pretty ugly light.  My Octa was already hanging almost as low as it could go off the bottom of the handrail, so I’m thinking that I have to fill in from the bottom. Set up a third light from the position I was shooting from (4 landings down from the background spot) and threw it 10 feet up behind me, and fired a frame with JUST the fill light to make sure the ratio was correct:

Too Hot. Remember that this third light is JUST a fill light, it should be under the key by quite a bit, not competing with it. Down a stop in output:

Got It. When we combine all three now, we should have a portrait that pops, and what we end up with is a clamshell setup, with a background light. Pretty standard setup, but for this location not easy to do!  Here’s what we got straight out-of-camera:

Looks good!  Here are a few photos so you can see the entire setup:

As Always, More to come!

-Rod