On Thursday we were given the task of recreating the lighting techniques of other photographers.
In this task we looked at the photographs and decided from where the light was projected, what intensity and how soft the light was as well. We had to consider the whole image.
We found that if we all looked at the images together we could all see different factors; such as where shadows drop. We used the studio lighting to position the lights. On the whole we were successful; however, it was when we were considering the fine details which we started to struggle a little, exactly getting the shadows to form and where was crucial. We tried getting the model positioned as accurately as possible so we could recreate the images properly.
The main issues we had to conquer was separating the light from the foreground light and the background light, so we used flags to block the foreground light bleeding onto the backdrop. Another issue was working out how to recreate a dark background using the light; we measured the ambient light of the background and decided to light the subject 3 stops brighter than the background so that it was dimmed out.
We found that using different instruments created better effects: such as the snoot directed light precisely for high contrast portraits; the closed umbrella for lesser directed light and then the soft boxes as fill lights. For the Rihanna photograph we used a beauty dish so that light would illuminate the skin to create a more balanced skin tone.
