Tuesday, October 06, 2009

"Lexi"

0001-Lexi Portrait-IMG_0005-1-Edit-Edit "Lexi" 
©David A. Ziser

Yesterday during my quick recap of the Tech Expo at Photoshop World, I posted a small image of my beautiful model, Lexi, who I had the pleasure of photographing in the Westcott booth.  I have to say, I loved that image and thought I would revisit it today in my “Image of the Day” post. This is a straight forward portrait image of a beautiful girl.  When I say “straight forward” I mean made with the simplest lighting set up possible. I used a Westcott Spiderlite TD5 modified by a 45 inch round Westcott Halo coming in from the left hand side. I nearly always bring my light in from the left because we “western hemispherians” read from left to right. That means that the portrait is illuminated from left to right – highlight to shadow – making for an easy visual exploration of tonal values of the portrait image. The 45 inch Halo wraps light around the subject resulting in soft, flattering highlight/shadow combinations in the image.  I used a reflector on the right side of her image to bounce a little fill light into the shadow side of Lexi’s face.  The panel you saw in yesterday’s post positioned over Lexi was simply used to block the large trade show lights coming from ceiling spoiling the lighting I had set up with the Halo. I tweaked the image just a bit in Photoshop to obtain my final result.  Not a bad shot for a trade show booth demo! Camera specs; Canon 5D fitted with 24-105mm IS lens at 105mm, F4.0 @ 1/60 second, ISO 400. Enjoy!  -David

4 comments:

  1. Lighting from the left. Gotcha! (awesome shot!)

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  2. beautiful David! Thank you for the explanation.

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  3. Great, I love the lighting technique, simple but accurate., Thank David for sharing and explanation.

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  4. Very nice David, thanks for sharing! Would you be able to show a little post on how you post processed this image (of Lexi)? It would be great to see...thanks!

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