PaulBender_1_1
Dec, 2015Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken in the kitchen of the house I was living in at the time. The walls had a nice texture and one of them was painted a deep red which I felt would be an interesting backdrop.Time
I wanted the photo to have a darker, edgier feel. In order to achieve the appropriate lighting the photo had to be taken after dark since one entire wall of the kitchen was windows.Lighting
For this shot, I knew that I wanted the subject to be strongly set out from the background while still being lit with a softer light. The only flash I had to work with was the on camera flash so I built an 11" x 17" soft box and mounted it to the top of my camera. I then turned off most of the lights in the room and made sure that the soft box was projecting a good amount of the light from the flash up onto the white ceiling. By adjusting the angle of the soft box on the top of the camera, I was able to fine tune the balance of front and top lighting to articulate the subject's features.Equipment
For this photo I used a Canon Rebel T3 with 18-55mm f/3.5 lens. Lighting was achieved by placing a DIY 11" x 17" soft box over the on-camera pop-up flash.Inspiration
Prior to this shoot I had been primarily photographing landscapes. I have always admired the work of Mark Seliger though and thought this portrait shoot would be a great opportunity to explore shooting in a more controlled studio-like environment.Editing
I shot in RAW format and slightly under exposed most of the shots to ensure there would be no washed out portions of the subject's face. I then adjusted white balance, shadows, highlights and sharpness in the RAW file before going through a retouching workflow in Photoshop. This included minor healing, frequency separation, dodge and burn and color grading.In my camera bag
I always have my Canon Rebel T3 and 18-55mm f/3.5 lens (that's the only lens I have at the moment). I also typically have a reflector/diffuser, neutral density filters, tripod, wired remote trigger and multiple memory cards.Feedback
The key to this image turning out the way it did was the soft quality of light. The soft box combined with the bounce light from the ceiling created a large light source that was relatively far away from the subject. These two things will always help when the goal is a nice softly lit portrait so keep an eye out for opportunities to leverage bounce light when shooting.
