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Dave Montizambert's Creating With Light Part 40 - Portrait Main Placement - part 2 of 1 2 3

by Dave Montizambert Published 01/12/2015

A decent sized window can provide a relatively large orifice through a building's wall to the ginormous north sky - it's really the sky that is the source of illumination, not the window, the window merely opens the wall revealing a portion of the sky to the subject rather than the whole sky and bear in mind that a large north facing window will quickly become a small source if you back your subject too far away from it. In terms of shaping the light, the window's dimensions give the sky a defined shape making it a rectangle, square, or circle. Despite this shaping which should make the light very similar to the light we get from typical lighting modifiers like soft-boxes, the catch lights in a subject's eyes from window-light appears different from typical studio portrait or fashion/glamour lighting since the window sees through to things like trees, buildings, cars, etc, rather than a single solid tone of sky. The resulting catch lights are a reflection of the outdoors and show all the objects in view outside. You can mimic this by adding shadows to the diffusion material of your lighting modifier or by blocking portions of it with gobos.

In the case of the image of Sadie in Image 001, gobos could have been added between the strobe and the backside of the panel, the gobos would block some light from parts of the panel's diffusion material which would make the rectangular catch lights uneven and broken up, they would be indiscernible from a catch light created by a window. As it was I didn't bother with this since the light disbursement over the panel's diffusion material was uneven which created a 'simply grand' gradation from lightgrey to white in Sadie's catch lights. An interesting fact is that the light quality is softer on Sadie in Image 001 than on model, Vendella, in Image 002, even though the 1.8m by 1.2m panel is way way smaller than the north-sky. It's a matter of distance and what gets in the way - the panel is less than a metre from Sadie with nothing blocking it, whereas the sky showing through the window is partially blocked from Vendella by dark buildings and trees thus reducing its apparent size.

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1st Published 01/12/2015
last update 09/12/2022 14:55:56

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