Putting the Devil into your Shadows

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Lighting Terrance

Creating appropriate lighting to portray Terrance Toogood as the dastardly villain he is, I enlisted lots of rich shadows. The best way to create lots of shadow form over a subject is to move your lights away from the camera axis, hint: oncamera flash makes for the worst main-light position since it is almost directly on axis with the camera lens. To really get great shadow form on a face, place the main-light to the side, or directly overtop, or underneath the subject. All four of these light positions will skim light across the subject, thus projecting lots of dramatic shadows, visually bringing out the 'character' in a subject.

Now Terrance Toogood is an honest down-to-earth tie-yourheroine-to-a-railway-track sort of character, and so the question of how to best portray his evil attributes didn’t take long to figure out; he absolutely needed to be lit from below as though lit from the fires of hell. Not wanting to open up my studio floor to the fires of hell I placed a 3’x4’ soft-box on the floor below and to the camera-left side of Terrance, see Image 06 lighting diagram A. The power of this light was adjusted until an incident meter, (pointed dome-directly at this light and held near Terrance's eyes), read exactly the same as the camera’s f5.6 @ 1/60th setting.

My choice of background was very dark indeed (somewhere near black in the final image), making it necessary to add separation lights to add backlighting on Terrance to prevent his shoulders from blending into the background too much. There were two lights placed behind Terrance for this purpose, one to his right and one to his left. The separation light on the camera left side to the frame (see Image 06 lighting diagram A) was covered with a frosted acetate gel to even out its hotspots. The power of this light was adjusted until an incident meter, with its dome pointed directly at this light and with its back against Terrance, read one stop darker (f4.0 @ 1/60th) than the camera’s f5.6 @ 1/60th setting. To see the effect of this separation light and main-light on Terrance, see Image 07 A.

The second separation light, on the camera-right side of frame, was fitted with a 3’x4’ soft-box, see Image 06 lighting diagram B. You are probably wondering why I had one separation light bare and the second separation light fitted with a soft-box? My reason was to ensure that if the second separation light cast any shadows, that these shadows should draw as little attention as possible. To make a shadow less noticeable all you need to do is make its edges softer; softer edges draw less attention than harder edges. Larger light sources see further into shadows, thus eating away at shadow edges rendering them softer. As it turned out, these shadows did not appear with the final poses used, but I felt it was better to be safe than sorry. The positioning of the first separation light relative to Terrance’s pose was in no danger of casting unwanted shadows on his neck and so I felt no need to fit it with a soft-box. Using the same metering method as on the first separation light, the second separation light was set to give an incident meter reading of two stops (f2.8 @ 1/60th) below the camera setting. To see the effect of this separation light on Terrance, see Image 07 B.

A fourth strobe head, placed to the right of the camera, was used to fill in the shadows to ensure some detail, see Image 06 lighting diagram C. A frosted acetate gel was added to its front to even out hotspots. The power of this light was adjusted until an incident meter, with its dome pointed directly at this light and with its back against Terrance’s face, read two stops darker (f2.8 @ 1/60th) than the camera’s f5.6 @ 1/60th setting. To see the effect of this separation light on Terrance, see Image 07 C.

Still on the topic of fill light values, let’s look back at Image 02. Here the fill light was turned up to read 1 stop darker than the camera setting – it read f4 @ 1/60th. Looking back at Image 04, the fill light was turned down to read 3 stops darker than the camera setting, it read f2 @ 1/60th. Keep in mind that when you add in the fill light it will add some exposure to the main-light’s mask of light, and so you need to compensate to maintain a correct exposure. For a 1 stop under-fill, notch up the aperture by a 1/2 stop (ie 5.6 becomes 5.6 and 5/10th); 2 stop under fill = aperture a 1/4 stop up; 3 stop under fill = aperture an 1/8th stop up.

You may be wondering why no soft-box was used on the fill light. I kept this light bare and far away so that it would create some 'sparkle' on the flesh in shadow areas such as on his nose and under his shadow side eye. In addition to this, the reflection of a small fill light source on the subject’s eyes is easier to hide or retouch away than the larger reflection caused by a larger light source such as a soft-box, umbrella, or scrim. The down side to this technique is, any unwanted shadows cast by this light will have hard-edge shadows which will draw attention. I did have a little of this happening from Terrance’s hat casting a shadow on his forehead.

Dynamic Range v Bit Depth

It’s a well-known fact that brightening dark shadows in an image during processing can lead to severe brain trauma due to frustration caused by digital banding and noise issues (see Lighting for Digital 5 article in the December 2007/January 2008 issue). It’s a less known fact that how much brightening of shadows you can get away is more dependent upon your camera’s bit depth rather than its dynamic range. Dynamic range and bit depth are often confused. Dynamic range is the range of tone that can be captured, meaning how far into the whites and how far into the blacks detail is captured. Whereas bit depth describes how many levels of brightness will be used to break down that total range so that the progression of tone looks continuous. Think of a ladder – the height of the ladder is dynamic range and the number of ladder rungs used to step up to the ladders max height represents levels of brightness or bit depth. A higher ladder equals greater dynamic range and a greater number of rungs on that ladder equal, greater bit depth.

You may hear photographers or manufacturers claim that their camera has a 10 stop dynamic range. That camera may well be able to capture information 10 stops down into the shadow, but how usable are those last stops? In a 12-bit capture, after the sixth stop things are pretty sketchy in the banding/noise department and the same for a 14-bit capture below the eighth stop.

Dave Montizambert

Dave Montizambert lectures internationally on lighting, digital photography and Adobe Photoshop. He is also a published author having written two books on lighting and digital photography (publisher Amherst Media) plus numerous magazine articles on these topics in North America and in Europe. Dave also creates Photoshop tutorial CDs & DVDs for www.software-cinema.com.

Dave is available for lectures and workshops in your area and can be reached at montizambert@telus.net or www.montizambert

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