06/08/2019
This week’s portrait flashback is a personal favourite of my Muse❤, a test shot captured during a pre-wedding portrait practice session to finalise my lighting configuration. The resulting photo can be converted into a fashion/beauty shot, but I prefer to keep it as a portrait infused with the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (beauty is imperfect, impermanent & incomplete).
I’d just begun adding some fashion-inspired posing tips to my skillset, used here to pose her hands to effectively display the great work obtained during a pre-wedding dinner party (hosted for Singithi & Robert). It was created in a typical example of my portable/travel studio setup.
The beautiful henna artwork on her hands was created by: Mehndi Designs & Beauty By Qadira
© 2015 Edmund N. Gall - edmundgall.photo. All rights reserved. Please contact me for non-watermarked license.
Key light: a single, off-camera Canon 600EX-RT flash with no colour correction gel bounced off a light, neutral coloured wall (apple white).
Fill & catchlights: Westcott Omega reflector (silver side for increased specularity).
Background: A foldable, wooden room divider/partition standing within 3 feet of subject - with some key light spill and backlight from windows (sun).
I wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to create an effective yet compact shooting space in a busy environment through cropping and use of what’s available. This was setup in a busy living/dining room when we visited my family abroad. The standing room divider was used to replace a very busy background (curtains, windows) with a less distracting yet interesting surface. I’ve included the previous version before final processing, with a landscape aspect ratio that showed other stuff that was nearby (a lamp, shelving unit, pictures, religious art, plant): I extended the partition to hide all of that the next day for the main portrait session. There was a couch just out of shot to camera left, and the Omega reflector was balanced on a coffee table. So the basic principle involved was: find the least distracting backdrop possible and crop/zoom in to exclude everything that doesn't enhance your subject.
The compromise when shooting in a compact space is the focal length that may be required. As I'm standing within 6 feet of her, I had to use a wider shooting angle (35mm on an APS-C sensor, or 56mm equivalent on a full frame sensor). To minimise distortion, keep the subject away from the corners of your frame. The space was large enough to capture headshots at 50-85mm focal lengths, though.
It was only after I sat down to do the post-processing that I realised there was a very happy accident (when something good happens that was not intentionally created by the photographer). The holes cut into the backdrop partition allowed some sunlight from the windows behind it to pass through and create a very slight but noticeable backlight that caught her hair’s highlights, jawline & shoulder to camera left. This added some separation of her brown hair from the brown backdrop, and gave a subtle, defining highlight to the shadowed side of her face (as the key light was at camera right). If you have only one light (i.e. a flash), there's nothing stopping you from using available lighting (sunlight, lamps, chandeliers, etc.) to enhance your photo: you just need to beware the risk of that lighting being of a different colour to your key light (i.e. warmer, cooler, and/or tinted) as it may need correcting in post.
Post-processing, via Adobe Photoshop Lightroom only, included: white balance correction, selective dodge & burn, colour correction (e.g. to fix lipstick), healing brush (just for dust removal and one skin blemish), sharpening/texture, and cropping plus medium vignetting to focus on my subject. If you flip between the two photos, you’d see the effects of many of these changes. Photoshop is an incredible tool, but often all of my post-processing can be achieved in Lightroom alone - this best demonstrates that (no Photoshop used here)...
