Fun with post processing and giant soft lights.

Emily. Austin. 2014.

I love to play around with lights and lenses. This image was shot with the K5600 HMI lights that I had as loaners for the last few months. Working with continuous lights (that had great color and tonality) was wonderful. You could see exactly what you would get and the ability to control highlights, shadows and depth of field was intoxicating. Need deeper shadows? Move the flag on the right side in a few more feet (or inches). Want to see what a larger aperture will give you? Click up one stop on your aperture and click up one stop on your shutter speed, snap and review. 

There's something about shooting an exposure of a person who is not frozen by flash that feels and looks (to me) different than what I see from studio flash stuff. Maybe it's the mix of vague ambient light and the main lights commingling and maybe it's just the quiet magic of not having a bright flash pop off every few seconds that makes the difference, but in these kinds of shoots things progress more quietly and organically. In the end I always seem to come out of the shoots with something more.

I used a big diffuser on the left and a net on a frame to the right as the main lighting set up. The net subtracted exposure from the shadows, neutralizing the white wall over to the right. I used a fresnel fixture on the background. The fresnel can give you a fairly controllable spot but a spot with soft edges. Just right for my kind of portraits. Toss in a little post processing (Thanks: DXO Film Pack 3) and you've got something different than my typical images. The HMIs are like shooting with liquid flash. I love them. I was sad to see them go today....

Here's one more: 

Emily. 

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