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Last week I was lucky enough to gain access to British Premier league Rugby Team The Worcester Warriors. I shot the team as part of a portraiture project I am currently undertaking at AIB, inspired by the portraiture of greats such as Platon, Martin Schoeller, Erwin Olaf to name a few, Ive been working on my lighting set up for a while now and it was great to get out and use it. Below is a brief round up of the planning and workarounds I employed to get the job done on my non-existent budget.
Camera phone shot of my studio set up.
Because I wanted to emulate my previous lighting that I had developed in the AIB studios and reproduce it on location for this shoot I had to overcome a number of technical obstacles prior to the shoot. My main obstacle was how to recreate a 4 light studio setup on location with only the use of small battery powered flash guns and a selection of octabox soft lights and silver umbrellas. My studio set up involved a martin Schoeller-esque twin strip soft box setup with a small honeycomb dish high directly over the camera at a full stop brighter as key light. The soft boxes where placed at 45 degrees to the subject at very close range at minims power as fill with the semi hard light of the dish providing a directional light and providing shadows to aid the contrast and skin detail of the subject.
The white backdrop was lit with a large Fresnel spot light to provide a bright absolute white backdrop. In the studio I shot with a Mamiya RZ67 at 1/125 f4 with a Phase one H5 back. Using Broncolor lights. Because I didn't have access to this level of kit on location I modified my own to meet my needs, To begin with I choose my camera- I was aiming to print these images A3 and although my 8mp Canon 20D produces great images I was worried that I would loose image quality by interpolation in the slight enlargement necessary to produce an A3 print size; so I borrowed a 10mp Canon 40D to cover this shortfall in image quality. The lens' and controls are almost identical and it was very easy to switch. I used a 50mm f1.8 prime lens to ensure the best possible image quality. As I was aiming for a very small DOF I went with an aperture of f3.5 and shot as 1/125 ISO 100.
Initial lights.
(Apologies for the messy room).
In order to achieve the strip softbox catch lights, which are integral to the look of the image, I aimed to produce, I modified the 36 inch octabox soft lights I owned by attaching two pieces of black suede fabric to either side of the boxes in order to produce a 36x 16 inch strip box in the centre of the octabox. These were sewn by my girlfriend, my dutiful mother and I. We attached them with small hooks that fasten onto the umbrella arms of the octabox.
With black flag covers. (Blags?)
For the key light I designed a small 12 inch beauty dish. This was made from a Wilkinson stainless steel mixing bowl, I used the bowl in conjunction with a custom built laser cut transparent acrylic frame (many thanks to the graphics depatment and workshop for the design and fabrication of this component), cut in a three prong configuration that held a 3 ¼ inch convex reversing mirror. I cut a hole in the bottom of the bowl for the flash head to fit through, the idea being that the light from the flash would pass through this hole into the bowl, hitting the mirror, the light would reflecting back into the inner surface of the dish where it would be thrown back out onto the subject.
The dish worked well; but during testing I found that the light spread it created was to wide and not quite soft enough for my purposes on this shoot, instead I used a 16 inch white umbrella to reflect light back to the subject in a soft but relatively tight key light source. With my light setup complete and my camera chosen my technical pre-production was complete.
I will be blogging about the shoot day and post-production very soon, watch this space.
Camera phone shot of my studio set up.
Because I wanted to emulate my previous lighting that I had developed in the AIB studios and reproduce it on location for this shoot I had to overcome a number of technical obstacles prior to the shoot. My main obstacle was how to recreate a 4 light studio setup on location with only the use of small battery powered flash guns and a selection of octabox soft lights and silver umbrellas. My studio set up involved a martin Schoeller-esque twin strip soft box setup with a small honeycomb dish high directly over the camera at a full stop brighter as key light. The soft boxes where placed at 45 degrees to the subject at very close range at minims power as fill with the semi hard light of the dish providing a directional light and providing shadows to aid the contrast and skin detail of the subject.
The white backdrop was lit with a large Fresnel spot light to provide a bright absolute white backdrop. In the studio I shot with a Mamiya RZ67 at 1/125 f4 with a Phase one H5 back. Using Broncolor lights. Because I didn't have access to this level of kit on location I modified my own to meet my needs, To begin with I choose my camera- I was aiming to print these images A3 and although my 8mp Canon 20D produces great images I was worried that I would loose image quality by interpolation in the slight enlargement necessary to produce an A3 print size; so I borrowed a 10mp Canon 40D to cover this shortfall in image quality. The lens' and controls are almost identical and it was very easy to switch. I used a 50mm f1.8 prime lens to ensure the best possible image quality. As I was aiming for a very small DOF I went with an aperture of f3.5 and shot as 1/125 ISO 100.
Initial lights.(Apologies for the messy room).
In order to achieve the strip softbox catch lights, which are integral to the look of the image, I aimed to produce, I modified the 36 inch octabox soft lights I owned by attaching two pieces of black suede fabric to either side of the boxes in order to produce a 36x 16 inch strip box in the centre of the octabox. These were sewn by my girlfriend, my dutiful mother and I. We attached them with small hooks that fasten onto the umbrella arms of the octabox.
With black flag covers. (Blags?)For the key light I designed a small 12 inch beauty dish. This was made from a Wilkinson stainless steel mixing bowl, I used the bowl in conjunction with a custom built laser cut transparent acrylic frame (many thanks to the graphics depatment and workshop for the design and fabrication of this component), cut in a three prong configuration that held a 3 ¼ inch convex reversing mirror. I cut a hole in the bottom of the bowl for the flash head to fit through, the idea being that the light from the flash would pass through this hole into the bowl, hitting the mirror, the light would reflecting back into the inner surface of the dish where it would be thrown back out onto the subject.
The dish worked well; but during testing I found that the light spread it created was to wide and not quite soft enough for my purposes on this shoot, instead I used a 16 inch white umbrella to reflect light back to the subject in a soft but relatively tight key light source. With my light setup complete and my camera chosen my technical pre-production was complete.
I will be blogging about the shoot day and post-production very soon, watch this space.
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1 comment:
Cool, I look forwards to seeing the results! If you're worried about printing large I would frame as tightly as possible and draw some extra white background in in Photoshop.
Also, in "These were sewn by my girlfriend, my dutiful mother and I", the pronoun is the object of the verb to sew, so it should actually be:
"These were sewn by my girlfriend, my dutiful mother and me."
Finally, "lens' and controls", what belongs to the lens here?
You're welcome ;)
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