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Lighting for digital Dave Montizambert - The Pie Plate Illusionist - part 3 of 1 2 3 4

by Dave Montizambert Published 01/12/2009

The wash of light from the background light illuminates the muslin too evenly and so barn doors are affixed to the light and adjusted to remove most of this light from off the backdrop. Along with this, aluminum foil turkey and pie plates are placed to the side of the background light. These reflectors bounce the light spilling past the backdrop back onto the muslin. They are adjusted to create interesting light patterns on the backdrop, see Image 7

Keeping the main-light spill off the background was not the only reason why I worked with a soft egg-crate on the main light-bank. Affixing an egg-crate to a light source has an added benefit, it increases light depth of field. Light depth of field means how fast the light falls off; as a subject moves away from the main-light their exposure value becomes darker.

Our main-light was placed in close to Cheyanne to create a softer quality of light. The closer a light is to the subject the faster the light falls off. This would not be an issue with a regular portrait where the subject stays in the same spot, but in this fashion shoot of Cheyanne, I wanted her to have the freedom to move around a little while posing. As I was shooting, Cheyanne was posing four to eight feet away from the main-light at any given moment.

Without the egg-crate she would be properly exposed at four feet but would be about 1½ stops under exposed at eight feet. With the 40˚ eggcrate in place, the fall off in exposure was about ½ stop from four to eight feet. A ½ a stop exposure change is acceptable, 1½ stops is not. Here's how this egg-crate phenomena works:

If Cheyanne were to look at the light source when she was four feet away, she would notice that a fair bit of the white soft box diffusion material is blocked by the soft egg-crate cells. Viewing the light source from eight feet away, Cheyanne would notice that most of the white soft box diffusion material is visible. In a nutshell, the cells of the eggcrate progressively block more light as you move closer to the source and progressively block less and less as you move away from the source, thereby evening out the exposure at the two distances by quite a bit.

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1st Published 01/12/2009
last update 09/12/2022 14:57:58

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