Today is #anythingcanhappenday on this Blog. Lately I’ve increased the number of portrait-related posts on the blog and based on the increased number of page views, people seem to be enjoying them. It is also Mary’s Birthday. If you follow her on Facebook, please be sure to wish her a Happy Birthday!
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Once that bell rings you’re on your own. It’s just you and the other guy.—Joe Louis
In 1952, Lester A. Dine invented the ring light as a method for making dental photographs but today people use these kinds of lights for all kinds of other photography.
A ring light is a circular light source that’s designed to surround the optical axis of a lens causing light to hit the subject from different angles, producing soft shadows in a way that’s similar to what a soft box might produce.
When photographing people, the unique way a ring light renders light also produces a shadowy halo around the subject that’s much beloved by fashion photographers. In addition to using a ring light for portraits, I use a small Canon ring flash to photograph butterflies but if you want to photograph people, to paraphrase Jaws Chief Brody, “You’re gonna need a bigger light.”
And Now for Something Different
I made this portrait of aspiring model Laura May Bachmayer (at left) using a 14-inch fluorescent dimmable Ring Light. There are similar ring lights available from all kinds of sources, some of them using fluorescent or LED lighting. For a more in-depth look at the use of LED vs Tungsten vs Fluorescent lighting, please check out this post.
How I made this photograph: For this portrait, I treated the 14-inch fluorescent dimmable Ring Light like it was an ordinary studio light and moved it to camera left and because placement was just slightly off-axis, the subject’s eyes retained some of the ring light’s classic circular catch lights. If you look closely at the subject’s eyes you will see the ring light is reflected as an oval-shaped catchlight. With the ring light centered on the subject, as shown in the setup photo above, it produces a flat-looking light, thanks to sticking the camera’s lens in the “ring.”
The camera used for this portrait of Laura May was a Canon EOS 60D with 85mm f/1.8 lens with an exposure of 1/40 sec at f/1.8 and ISO 400 showing how the use of a fast prime lens allowed me to shoot at a lower ISO than when shooting with slower, zoom lenses. My final exposure may have been a bit underexposed because, for some reason, the exposure compensation was set at minus one stop, so I applied the technique I use for underexposed subjects. The JPEG file (this was before I went all in on RAW+JPEG) was tweaked in Imagenomics’ Portraiture before adding some tweaks using Vivenza
Postscript.If you have any questions about any high ISO’s that I’ve used for some of my continuous light portraits, please check out my post, “Why Such High ISO’s for my LED Portraits?” This portrait was not made using an LED light source but I’ve had similar experiences when working with other continuous lighting sources.
Note for my Patreon Subscribers. After looking at all of the images in this series , I noticed that I might be able make a nice Bonus post out of some of them for one of my uncensored Password Protected posts. If you are interested in seeing some of the other images from this session, click CONTACT and let me know. If you are not yet a Patreon subscriber—it’s surprisingly inexpensive—details on how to sign up can be found here.