The Zeroplusplus Photography Blog is about creative lighting techniques for the frugal photographer. Frugal does not mean cheap lighting, it means being resourceful with what you have to work with. Tim and I show you the lighting modifiers and techniques we use for our commercial projects. And we like to show lighting examples that we use everyday…modifiers and lighting not so obvious to the casual observer.
1) DIY Nylon Panel – soft and diffused lighting for $50
2) Bare Octabox – mimic the 10am or 2pm Sun
3) Grided Octabox w/ToughFrost Disc – removes the center hotspot
4) DIY Octabox Ring Light – ring light shadow without the harshness
Early on in our careers, Tim and I assisted many commercial photographers, and were very fortunate to learn a variety of lighting modifiers and lighting techniques. The “Creative Lighting for People Photography” video tutorial demonstrates the 50 most popular lighting techniques we use for our commercial photography.
Several people emailed us and asked “what is different about your video and modifiers”. OK, below is 6 minute clip discussing the nylon panel and 3 different octabox mods.
In 2001 I spent 2 years as a part-time digital retoucher for a very large commercial lab. During that time, I learned a great deal from the expert retouchers, those with 10+ years of experience. Later I learned color management and ran the massive 60″ Roland 12 color inkjet printers. It was my paid film photography to digital photography education.
As I mentioned in the Working with Film Curves article, the retouching step is really the second step in my digital workflow. Everyone has a different workflow and methods, use what works best for you.
My point is, sure I can retouch the hell out of an image. But my clients rarely need extensive retouching. For portraits and fashion work, 95% of the time I can get away with the batch processing you will see in the video clip. For modeling agency models portfolios I do even less, the plastic skin look is “OUT”.
The film curve video clip is actually the final step of my 3-step digital workflow. I understand that everyone has a different way of retouching, so the retouching clip will be in Part 3.
Essentially, I expose, light and process for a low contrast image that retains as much digital information as possible. My final step in completing the finished image, is to add a film curve from AlienSkin Exposure 2 (now version 3). I particularly like the color negative film stocks and the B&W section is equally impressive.
For the most customizable B&W image settings, I prefer NIK Silver Efex Pro. The options and image quality is amazing. It is a complete fine-art B&W digital darkroom. What took me hours to print in the “tradition wet darkroom”, I now do in minutes.
Six years ago I stumbled on this camera setup technique on the Moose Peterson website. He discovered that by changing the sharpness, saturation, and tone (contrast), to the lowest values, the camera histogram displayed additional room at the shadow and highlight values.
Later I learned that this happens because our camera histogram isn’t based on the linear RAW data. The preview/histogram is based on the rendered gamma-corrected JPEG produced by the camera…of the image we just shot. By changing the 3 settings mentioned above, I “trick the internal camera processor”, resulting in a much lower contrast image, with additional detail in the shadow and highlight areas. I may even expose differently given that the camera histogram looks different as well.
Today we had a meeting with a fantastic local designer, Madina Vadache. During our conversation we discussed her editorial shoot, as well as the “lookbook” shoot for her Spring 2011 collection.
We scheduled a shoot for the 16th of August, so stay tuned for those images later this month. The location, model, and designs are absolutely stunning. Gotta love Seattle for great architecture and design.
A short BTS editorial video clip we shot last Monday featuring two Seattle designers, Kimmi Designs and Mac Fashion House, Kay Matthews did the hair and makeup styling. We included the lighting diagrams for each image created.
We use very simple lighting, less is more and appears natural. We spend a great deal of time on poses and expressions and making sure the wardrobe looks good.
No photoshop fixes for lighting, just a simple film curve and color toning.
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