Portrait Lighting and Model Shoot

Two posts in one day, whatever next?! Well, I am sort of stuck at home on 'Fella Watch' today as he isn't well. He's been ill since Monday - thankfully, he seems a bit better today (his temperature has come down) and I am delighted that he is asleep on the sofa at the moment and not, um - how to put this gently - shut in the bathroom, making noises like a dying animal.

Was that too much information? Okay, well to distract you from the mental image of my husband dealing manfully with the explosive output from his gastric system, here is my output from the portrait lighting demo that we did in class recently:

This is just a very quick guide to some basic studio portrait lighting - Broad, Glamour, Rembrandt, Split and Narrow.

The next images are from the high and low key photo shoot that we did to explore the above lighting for ourselves. We also got to play with some other portrait light set-ups as well.

The brief that we were given for our shoot was to come up with an overall, emotionally evocative triptych plus provide a small selection of other portraits. Just to demonstrate that we had explored a range of different lighting set-ups during the session. In addition, we were asked to convert all of our images to black and white so that we could review the three-dimensional rendering of our subjects with the lighting that we set up.

This is my emotionally evocative tripdych - my theme and brief to my model was 'Dreamy on a Weekend Morning'.

These are two of my other high key lighting examples. I do not particularly like either of them but I truly dislike the one on the right. I took it to crit on purpose - the pose reminds me of a school photo and I did not get the effect that I was looking for with the ring flash - yuck!

These are my low key examples. The image on the right is a narrow - rim lighting shot simply to fulfil the exercise brief. The other two are closer to what I had in mind for the shoot. I was told beforehand that my model is both an actor and in a band. So for the left and centre images, I researched actor publicity shots, theatre lighting and pulled together some classic gestures/poses from some Shakespeare plays to come up with some ideas for my shoot. I was feeling quite smug and prepared when I got to the studio...

...unfortunately, when I met my model, it turned out that he actually does tv comedy type things, rather than classic theatre type things! Opps - poor chap. At one point I asked him to pose with a melon so that he could emulate some of those classic poses from Hamlet. Later, I had him posing with flowers.

He dealt with both props valiantly though and was cheerful throughout (even if I did catch him knocking on the melon to see if anyone was there and putting it up to his ear to hear if it was talking back to him) - happy to share the outtakes if you would like to see them!