Feb 13th 2012

This week I had an interesting job via an excellent design agency called myjoma for a media boss setting up a new blog for herself.  She wanted the blog (called What's Pink Today) to have some strong visuals of herself with splashes of pink on a monochrome set of images.

It turned out to be a very conceptual shoot-this wasn't a portrait shoot designed to capture 'her personality'; it was a shoot for a range of images that could be used to illusttrate her blog and the various content she would be posting.  This could be a rant about bankers, a good news piece about special deals or a fun post.  It was my task to come up with a range of poses that could illustrate these themes and allow for the spot colouring to be subtle but evident.

For this one I used a studio and used my lights to create the 'infinity' effect with a white flor and backdrop.  To do this you need at least six lights and six light stands, a wireless trigger system and some light modifiers.  You need lights as follows: two for the background, two for the floor and two for the subject.

I use four lights from Lencarta-I find them excellent value for money, reliable and easy to use.  I put my Safari lights barebulb inside my Lastolite hilite background because these are powered from a portable batery pack which delivers equal amounts of power to each light-perfect for the job of evenly lighting the background because I don't want to fiddle with different light outputs anyway.  I just want it evenly lit from side to side and top to bottom.  Once these are in I set the power so I'm getting f8-f8.5 on my light meter-I go for a stop to a stop and a little-bit-over for my backgrounds.  I don't subscribe to the theory they should be two stops brighter than the subject.  I know this makes theoretical sense but in practice I find light spill and having the subject too close to the backdrop causes fringing and other unwanted 'hot spots' to appear; the back of the head/hair being particularly susceptible.

Next I set my floor lights.  These go on light stands to the side of the floor, nice and low, with standard light shapers on them.  Again, I set the power so I'm getting f8-f11.  These usually need a bit more power to keep the floor evenly lit because they are sending light elsewhere too with the standard reflectors on and it's important to ensure your floor isn't slightly duller than your background.  The studio should look like this when set properly:

Finally, I set the key and fill lights up inside two soft boxes.  I have Elinchrom D Lites for this.  I used them before I switched to Lencarta but they all have a slave receiver so they all fire and 'talk' to each other so it's no problem.  These are set to light the subject at f5.6 ISO 400.  That's a good stop or more below the floor and background so the subject should be now against a pure white backdrop.

With a single Elinchrom Skyport I can trigger all the lights because they are all set to slave.  Unlike the speedlights from Canon which need a receiver on each flash in order to fire them all wirelessly with this set up.