Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Over the years and in various bog posts, I’ve often written about where I get my inspiration for making new photographs; More often than not the main one seems to be the movies but the other is photography by my friends such as Cliff Lawson, Barry Staver and others.
A while ago my old pal Rick Sammon posted a portrait of a model on his website in a pose much like the one above. I really liked his idea and although Rick used speedlights for his lighting setup I decided to do my interpretation using a continuous light source, in this case a LED light from a Rotolight RL48 Interview Kit.
Rotolight’s RL-48’s are small battery powered LED light sources and use three AA batteries, These LED lights that are extremely lightweight (6 oz,) so you can place them in lots of places where heavier light might not work or in this case dangling from a tilted lightstand. My image ended up having a totally different look from Rick’s but was nevertheless inspired by it; all created using these small affordable LED lights. You can see how I created today’s image in the lighting setup below.
How I made this shot: This portrait of Amber was made using my former Canon EOS 50D and my all-time favorite portrait lens Canon’s EF 85mm f/1.8. The background was a 5×7-foot Photo Grey Savage Infinity vinyl background that was hanging on my falling apart JTL background stands. She is laying on one of Silverlake Photo Accessories Faux Floors. Exposure was 1/60 sec at f/1.8 at ISO 640. The RAW file was retouched and then processed in Analog Efex Pro and Color Efex Pro.
If you’re interested in learning how I use cameras, lenses and lighting in my in-home studio and on location, please pick up a copy of Studio Lighting Anywhere which is available new from Amazon.com for $31.89 or used starting at less than four bucks, as I write this. The Kindle version is $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.