I plan to incorporate more of this sort of posting in the future along with technical info and who knows what else. To quote David Ziser, it is always good to ask yourself “I wonder what would happen if.” What I took away from the experiment is that understanding the behavior of my light modifiers helps me to achieve my lighting vision and can even act as a catalyst for creating something that might otherwise have never come into being. Kudos to Bibble Labs.Īs you can see, there are a lot of subtle variables to play with and this sort of thing is truly a season to taste recipe. I think this completes the image and gives a print ready file without Photoshop. Retouching amounts to darkened the shirt, a slight vignette, burned down highlight on the nose, slight eye enhancement, and a minor color correction. Note how ig only hits the front of the face showing facial contours at the front and not the sides.Īnd the final image with some retouching applied in Bibble 5 layers. This is an early shot showing just the grid light. I was using just the edge of light, which made the lighting effect even more dependent on positioning. Placement of the gridded light is critical. The gridded light is high and directly in front of the subject. You can see that the umbrella is relatively close and off to the side a bit. This is my initial setup with the backlight facing (me) the subject ( click the image for a larger view). There is no right tool other than the one that fulfills your vision.

The choice of light modifiers is kind of personal. I expect that similar results could be obtained with a gridded beauty dish. The gridded light is using a 10 degree grid in a standard 7” reflector. More likely I will use the Softlighter again, but put the diffusion screen on it. My 48” x 32” Photoflex softbox would have worked just as well, but with a slightly different look. I wanted a large, relatively even light source, so chose to use the large bounce umbrella. The backlight is behind and wearing an Interfit oval backlight reflector.Īny normal key light setup would work for this. The gridded light is at top pointing down so that it just glances the face. You can just see the key light, a 60” Photek Softlighter configured as a bounce umbrella. Here is the basic setup ( click the image for a larger view). It seemed too that the direction of light could come from an off-axis angle and might look best if coming from nearly directly above. I reasoned that a grid would be helpful to control exactly where the small light would have its effect. Thinking about this prompted me to experiment with supplementing a large soft light source with a small light source to give a slight contrast boost (facial contouring). It produces really nice light quality for a single light source, but not perfect in terms of falloff or facial contouring. I like that it offers a relatively soft light with just enough punch for good shadows to define the contours of the face. Another configuration that gets used is a single Softlighter, configured as a softbox umbrella. I often use a large softbox or umbrella and add a small umbrella or softbox right next to it, Monte Zucker style. As I see things, the larger the light, the closer it resembles ambient room light by providing a gentle falloff at the sides.

As described in this post on Quality of Light, a large light source produces soft light (soft shadows) and a small light source produces hard light (sharp shadows). This is one of those, what would happen if, type experiments where I was pondering the idea of accenting the face a little bit by sculpting with light. The grid lets us place the contrast at a specific area with minimal impact on the rest of the lighting. What is really going on here is that a small light source at a low lighting ratio is being used to give a subtle, but important contrast boost to the face. The title for today's post is a bit misleading, as a grid doesn't really increase contrast, it only increases the directionality of light giving more control over where the light will and will not appear.

Gridded softbox