Experiment with lighting

January 23rd, 2022

I was diagnosed with COVID this past week and down all week resting and watching lighting video inspirations (See previous blog for links to sites). I felt well enough today to experiment with some lighting ideas with my new mannequin “Emi”. The first experiment was using a single strobe with a 1’4’ softbox to the left combined with a V-Flat to the right.

Left Side 1’4’ Soft box with no reflector

The first image was produced with a Profoto D2 and 1’4’ strip box directly to the left and a white V-Flat reflector to the right. Both the modifiers were placed just barely out of the frame. Notice that you can see some detail in the shadows but they are very dense.

Left Angled Side with 1’4’ Soft box with reflector

The second image involved slight adjustments to the strobe to point the soft box at an angle. I only turned the light around 45 degrees. I increased the Profoto D2 power up .7 to compensate for the light being angled. The resulting image shows how the reflector provides a nice spread of light over the body

Left Angled Side with 1’4’ soft box

I removed the reflector from the previous shot to create this image of the figure. This produced very dark shadows.

1’4’ soft boxes: Left side angled forward and right behind

I added a second Profoto D2 to the back and right of the subject. This resulted in lovely edge lighting to the right. It filled in some of the shadows.

Left side/Right behind 1’4’ soft boxes with reflector

In order to decreased the dark shadows, I added a white v-flat reflector to the right front. This does a nice job of filling in details