Light Exercise: Mood Lighting

Light Exercise is a segment of my blog detailing my misadventures with light. In a nutshell, I grab a flash or two from my bag, throw it up in the air add it to the mix, and see what happens.

Not being much of a fan of travel, I often resort to working in locations that are accessible to me. In the process, I’ve developed a knack for making ordinary settings look remarkable or at the very least, different. In working with light, I’ve noticed that it does not only change the look of a place, but the mood of a picture as well.

Case in point, meet Harold’s good twin.

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In the above portrait, the subject was lit with a single flash shot through a gridded beauty dish (which I just called a dish in front of Harold to preserve his manhood). The dish was placed on camera right, just a few feet above his face. I shot Harold in front of a wooden door. I find that the texture of the wood lends a certain character to the shot. In post, I made the usual basic adjustments (exposure, contrast, sharpening, etc.), but decreased the clarity of the image to soften it up a bit to get a dreamy look. I also added a vignette at the end to darken the corners of the image and focus the viewer’s attention on his face.

And speaking of his face, Harold’s faraway stare off-camera coupled with how the portrait was lit suggests that this guy’s a keeper. He’s going to wait for you no matter how fashionably late you are what. Which isn’t probably what you’d say about his darker half.

The gritty Pacquiao-esque look was achieved with three flashes. Two of them are on either side of the subject and were shot through grids. The third flash is still in the gridded beauty dish placed in front of the subject. The vital step here is that the third light is powered down considerably relative to the two flashes used as rim lights. On top of the basic processing I do in post, I boosted clarity to bring out the details and then desaturated the image to optimize badass-ery.

One person, two different lighting setups, and seemingly two different versions of the same man. The first is the one you’ll take home to your ma, while the second is the one that you’ll fall in love with and insist on ‘saving’.

More to come…