i fell in love with the light in this portrait

georg wachberger · November 1, 2012

how do you think it was achieved? what puzzles me is the

strong shadow and the mild light. could imagine it was

photoshopped.

i'm new to lighting, please have mercy if this question seems

trivial for you.

Edited November 1, 2012 by georg wachberger

Adrian Sierkowski · November 1, 2012

Single slightly soft source at about 45 up high camera right. Little bit of bounce off of the wall and exposing for the highlights to let most other things stay a bit under.

You can tell by the directions of the shadow to extrapolate where the source was. As it's a still it may well have been a strobe source, but you can accomplish this with a constant source.

georg wachberger · November 2, 2012

Single slightly soft source at about 45 up high camera right. Little bit of bounce off of the wall and exposing for the highlights to let most other things stay a bit under.

You can tell by the directions of the shadow to extrapolate where the source was. As it's a still it may well have been a strobe source, but you can accomplish this with a constant source.

great. i was 'afraid' it would be that simple. i have a follow up

question. i intend to light a whole scene like this. it is rooftop

at night and i plan to use a simple light source 45 degrees down.

the action will take place on an area of 4-3 meters max.

i shot at the same location already (i love it), but at that time the

theme was different. it was a mental hospital scene with more light

in general. i attach some pics. we used no soft source, just a bunch

of arri 300 and 650, if i recall correctly.

this time it will be a more tragic with a prostitute dying and i need

to take the light a notch down, which i am thoroughly afraid of ...

any advice most welcome. i was contemplating on buying a 1k-2k

LED panel the other day. would save me worry about temperature,

which concerns me since the rooftop is a wooden construction

basically. but from what i read LEDs are not yet there where one would

like them to be ...

maybe i go for taking the arris again and soften them with a big white

panel (don't know if that is the right term). or i buy some 2K light from

kinoflo (vista beam 310 seems nice to my uneducated eye).

plus i will go for a tick warmer look this time. don't know exactly how to

achieve it yet. we will shoot with an F3, some sony primes and maybe

support with a 5D here and there.

georg wachberger · November 2, 2012

pics:

georg wachberger · November 2, 2012

sorry, i struggle with uploading pics ...

georg wachberger · November 2, 2012

not sure if this upload works, looks like i exceeded some upload

quota ...

georg wachberger · November 2, 2012

here are the location pics in a link to my blog.

My link

Adrian Sierkowski · November 2, 2012

I'm not an LED fan, personally, nor a Kino Flo fan.

I probably wouldn't diffuse anything with bounce boards as that gets harder to control faster. I'd probably o for something like Opal diffusion on the doors just to take the "edge off," of the hard sources and then control them all with flags.

Of course, if you want it warmer you can either filter (81EF) or you can change the white balance in your camera more towards daylight (something like 4000K or so).

Good luck.