Tuesdays Tips Tricks and Techniques - Setting up the shot

Today's post will be a little different, being that I will not be talking specifically about portrait photography. These tips, while talking about a still life setup, are equally important in lighting a portrait and can be used, and should be used just the same.

So where do you even start when setting up a scene and using multiple light sources? For this shot, I had an idea of what the finished product would look like as well as the style of lighting i wanted to use so I setup the lights and powered up the two main lights as well as introduced a single aspect of the scene. When lighting glass you generally do not want to light it from the front, you would get some very unflattering glare and reflections. Knowing I wanted a darker background I chose to light this scene from both sides with gridded soft boxes. If I was going to use a lighter background, I would have lit the main scene from the back.

Now I had my main lights setup and I adjusted the power to get the look I wanted. Since I was using two main lights, I had them both on to start with, but if I was going to use a main light, a fill light and a background light, I would introduce one at a time, this lets you better see what each light is doing. When you are starting out, it is a good exercise to add one light at a time and to power off the light you already setup; this gives you an even better understanding of what the light is doing. This is one of the amazing perks of shooting digital, you get to see what each light does and to build the scene little by little.

Here I added another element to the scene as well as the addition of a background light. You can do an isolated, solid black background but it makes the scene feel dead. Adding a little gradient of light helps to bring everything to life. Now it is time to add in the rest of the elements and to dial in the lighting.

Adding the rest of the elements showed where I had issues with the lights. Before the bottle and glass were well lit but now the book and skull blocked a good bit of the light on the left side of the bottle and the front of the book was much too dark.

To keep some shadows I powered down the light on the camera right and brought it forward to spill over on the front of the book, I also increased the power on the camera left light and moved it back and aimed it at more of an angle toward the camera. This kept everything well lit while providing some interesting shadows.

Time to add the wine to the glass and make final adjustments. This is nice but I felt like it needed just a little bit of fill from the front.

It is very subtle but I thought it needed just that little extra light. I shot much wider than I needed to, but that makes the cropping easier later, and with the sensor size of these digital cameras, you can get away with it, especially if you are not printing huge. The lighting and setup is all done, now it is time to do your edits. Sorry, but I may keep a few secrets today :)

If you don't have many lights but can use photo editing well you could do this all with one light. To do that, you need a solid tripod with remote (you don't want to touch the camera at all). All you do is setup your one light in each spot and combine all of the exposures in editing. It is a great way to start if you only have one light. This setup ended up using two gridded soft boxes, one gridded spotlight on the background and a large reflector for fill. The setup is kind of like a little dance which you can see in the animated gif below.

                                                     

Was this helpful to you? You can use these same techniques when lighting a portrait. Start with one light and fine tune it, adding in more elements as you are ready. Start small and work your way up.