On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 08:59:34PM -0400, Bruce Walker wrote: > A straight-forward "studio" portrait of my niece, Sophie. Shot on > location in my sister's living room (she's a champ to put up with me > rearranging the whole thing). > > http://flic.kr/p/fy42fh > > I was also testing my latest money-saving invention: $10 IKEA > background support system. Ingredients: One Hugad black curtain rod, > 210-385 cm; 2x Betydlig curtain rod brackets, top-slot filed out to > fit 1/4" stud on top of light stand; use with two cheap 8' light > stands.
That sounds a lot like something I've done. > > K20D, DA* 50-135/2.8 @ 90mm/f:5, 1/160th, ISO 100; > Lr + Ps + Nik + Portraiture > > Paramount short lighting with reflector fill. AF540FGZ in Westcott > Medium Apollo above-left, key; AF540FGZ in 30" umbrella softbox, > boomed above behind-right, hair; 42" silver reflector, right. > > Comments welcome! The lighting is damn near perfect. There are a few things that I think you might have done differently, advice that is worth approximately what it's costing you. 1) The dark green shirt is too close in color to the grey background. I think that a red, or maroon sweater would have worked a lot better. Alternatively, maybe some rim lighting would have set it off. 2) I find the creases on the backdrop distracting. The ideal situation would involve a room two or three times the size of the one you had, where you could move the backdrop far enough away that it would have been either totally out of focus, unlit, or both. Alternatively, if there is any way you could have used gobos to keep most of the light off the backdrop and just hit it with a spot behind Sophie, to add contrast, then you'd only need a small unwrinkled area of background. That could have also set off the sweater. To prevent the distracting creases like those, I do one of two things. I will either store a backdrop rolled up on a 10' section of ABS so that it is smooth, and has no creases. Or I will store it wadded up in a bin, so that it is covered by random wrinkles, with no distracting patterns. Although, what I usually really do is just make sure that my lights are much closer to my model than the background, and ideally not even hitting the backgound, because if you can't see the backdrop, then you can't see the creases. > > -- > -bmw > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com http://red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.