It’s #anythingcanhappenday and today’s post features a portrait of Laura May Bachmayer, a young aspiring model who I worked with for a few shoots while testing various lighting systems, including the ring light that’s featured in today’s post.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“I have always had an instinct for doing new things. Call it good or bad, I love to experiment.”— Ravi Shankar
I believe that Mr. Shankar’s above statement can also apply to photography, including portraiture where it’s all too easy to place a subject in “Pose A”, then move onto “Pose B,” making the whole process so mechanical that R2D2 could shoot this kind of portrait or maybe AI, according to whatever dystopian world we find ourselves in. The featured portrait, while maybe not straight out of the camera, some retouching was involved, is not Ai.
That’s not what your portraiture subjects or clients want to see or experience. They want a portrait of themselves that’s different from the last one you made and especially one that captures their individuality or essence. The same thing goes for the lighting. setup that you decide to use for your next portrait session.
Using Only One Light
How I made this portrait: Today’s featured portrait of Laura Mat Bachmayer was made with the model posing in my home studio and here’s how I made it: For certain kinds of portraits, you can sometime can get by by using just one light with no strings required. In fact a famous local portrait photographer once told me that he preferred using only one light when shooting portraits.
For this photograph of Laura May, I treated a 14-inch Fluorescent Ring Light like it was an ordinary studio light and moved it off center to camera left instead of shooting through it in typical ring light fashion. If you look closely at the subject’s eyes you will see the ring light is reflected as an oval-shaped catchlight because of its position. The camera used This 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 with a plus one-third stop exposure compensation. It shows how the use of a fast prime lens allowed me to shoot at a lower ISO setting than when shooting with slower, zoom lenses.
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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 complete exposure data for each image. New copies are available from Amazon for $45.08. with used copies selling for around forty-one bucks as I write this. The Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.