Today’s Post by Joe Farace
The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.– Robert Kiyosaki
I have a friend Daniel who lives in Nairobi, Kenya who is a extremely talented portrait photographer. You should follow him on Instagram (@eyeboll_studios.) His studio photography is inventive and breathtaking, especially in his use of backgrounds and the looks he creates with them. I marveled how he did this until in one of the Instagram reels he shows that he creates them in Photoshop! The studio itself has a classic white background. Well that got me thinking…
My home studio only measures 11×15 feet but on one end of the room the wall is angled and has a doorway making shooting full length portraits a challenge. You can see the doorway in this post, Single Light Boudoir Photography, where Colleen Brianne is actually posing in the doorway.
Making the Most of the Space
Shooting full length poses in tight quarters typically requires wider angle lenses than I typically prefer to use for making portraits but some compromise are required when working in smaller spaces. Making wider angle lenses work for this kind of shot requires special attention to camera height and sometime I find that kneeling down or sitting in a chair (thus lowering the camera) to photograph the model works best for me. You can use whatever contortionist trick works for you as long as you are not shooting down on your subject while using a wider-angle lens. If you do it, the effect will produce unflattering foreshortened and distorted portraits with disproportionately large head sizes.
I know that some young photographers actually like this look; I do not. Don’t get too low either because then you’ll end up looking up your subjects nostrils. That’s not a good look for most subjects.
How I made this portrait: The above right image of six-foot tall model Danielle was made during our first shoot together and she’s is in some kind of modelly pose but that’s to be expected when working with a new model in a studio where she has no props to interact with. This pose works with her wardrobe and the seamless paper background that can be pulled out into my studio’s floor.
As you can see in the above setup, the 53-inch roll of Savage’s classic Ocean Blue seamless paper. does not fully cover the frame. For the final image I used Photoshop’s Edit >Content Aware Scale to extend the background to the edges of the frame. Some Clone Stamp use was required to clean up the wrinkled leading edge of the seamless paper. In this setup a 60-inch parabolic umbrella was mounted in shoot-through mode onto a Bicolor LED light that was placed at camera right.
A another LED light was placed at camera left to provide side lighting, although in this shot it didn’t seem to do much. The camera used was a Canon EOS 60D with EF-S15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens (at 35mm) with an exposure of 1/80 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 640.
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My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography and includes information on all of the cameras used as well as the exposure data for each image. Used books are available from Amazon for $33.17, I write this. A Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.