lighting Let there be light... metering

sfoster

sfoster

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I finally got myself a light meter (Sekonic L-308X-U) it's pretty cool!
Dall-E whipped up a "Free Headshots" flyer for me and I booked three sessions.

Check it out!
My first time ever using a light meter + my first ever attempt at a "professional looking" image.

BobSerious3.JPG

drive.google.com drive.google.com

Theo3-24Headshot1.jpg

drive.google.com drive.google.com

Theo3-24HeadshotComedy.JPG

drive.google.com drive.google.com

PicDave3302.JPG

drive.google.com drive.google.com

Took me long enough.
 
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Had my last free headshot appointment - A woman this time.

DSC04264.JPG

drive.google.com drive.google.com

I also thought this was a fun challenge of shooting her black hair on a black background..
It's cool but I'm capturing way too much skin detail, I can see every pore, I think I need to play with some camera settings.

DSC03925.JPG

drive.google.com drive.google.com

I posted a compilation of the 4 actor's photos on facebook and offered to do paid sessions for $60, kinda cheap, but I've never charged anything before. Three people replied wanting to be paying clients! I think that means I'm about to cross the threshold into being a professional?
 
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sfoster said:
I'm capturing way too much skin detail, I can see every pore, I think I need to play with some camera settings.
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You can never have too much detail in still photography! If you're achieving that kind of high resolution, then your camera settings are perfect; any further improvements should be done with the use of filters, either the "hard copy" version in front of the lens or (more professional) digital ones when you're processing the RAW image. You are shooting in RAW, aren't you ... ? :cool:

sfoster said:
a fun challenge of shooting her black hair on a black background.
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For enhanced fun, add a little back lighting to make the wispy hairs stand out even more. ;)

This guy, Philip McCordall (rarely uploads these days), has a good tutorial on shooting black-on-black, aswell as a number of videos on portrait lighting, including one for small spaces and this one for the mid-key style you've been doing.
 
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I posted those 4 peoples headshots in the facebook actor group and landed four paying clients.
So I'm officially a professional photographer!!! Pretty cool.

I really lowballed at $60 - right afterward someone else posted asking $500 😆
I'm just happy to finally be paid to take pictures.

CelticRambler said:
For enhanced fun, add a little back lighting to make the wispy hairs stand out even more. ;)
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I had two backlights on her - one was a horizontal nanlite tube for the top of her head, the other was a vertical strip soft box on camera left.
You're right I would have benefitted from another strip soft box camera right, but I ran out of lights and don't have money for more rn.

the 'black on black video' reminds of me of the product photography/commercials deep dive I did a few years back
I like this guys channel, really cool creative stuff in it.


 
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Congratulations on becoming a pro. :woohoo:

sfoster said:
I would have benefitted from another strip soft box camera right, but I ran out of lights and don't have money for more rn.
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In a few of his other videos, P.McC shows how to get around that problem using reflectors and mirrors, with repeated examples of where to place them, at what angle and when to shield them.

A novelty wig on a balloon would give you plenty of scope for practice and experimentation around this detail without having to suffer the critical impatient gaze from a real human head. :idea:
 
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CelticRambler said:
You can never have too much detail in still photography! If you're achieving that kind of high resolution, then your camera settings are perfect;
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This is so far from perfect....

p2.JPG

drive.google.com drive.google.com

everytime I photograph a woman its something like that where the skin texture is massacred.
i'm supposed to charge someone for this on tuesday 😳
 
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sfoster said:
the skin texture is massacred displayed exactly as it is in real life
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Fixed that for you! 🤓

What you're dealing with there is expectation vs reality. In one of the many branches of my professional life, I look at skin up close, and that's exactly how it looks. When "ordinary people" look at skin on other "ordinary people" they apply a sort of in-built soft-focus filter to conveniently not see all the rough texture, zits, microscars, wrinkles, etc. Our brains are incredibly good - and incredibly fast - at photoshopping the raw images captured by our retinas (and applying image stabilisation when our noggin is wobbling around all over the place).

From the way you've phrased the second sentence, it sounds like you're also dealing with our in-built gender profiling. A younger woman with a ... "richly textured" skin is kinda ugly; a guy - especially an old guy - with the same would be showing "lots of character". I'd hazard a guess that the everytimes you're referring to are all younger women hoping to make an impression, rather than some wrinkly "aul' wan" who couldn't give a fk anymore what people think of her? :D

To make this image "better" you need to make it less realistic, either by using a soft-focus filter to stop that level of detail arriving at the camera sensor in the first place, or by applying a beauty blur in post. The advantage of the soft-focus filter is that it does most of the work for you, at the price of soft-focussing everything, including eyes/eyelashes, wisps of hair, etc, and there's no way of recovering that detail. The advantage of applying filters in post is that you can pick and choose how much blur to apply and where, and have multiple different treatments for different parts of the image; the disadvantage is that that's a lot of work, especially for the first image in any series.

Side note: what you see as a massacred skin is an essential feature in creating the "feel" and colour of this individual's face. If you're applying blur filters in post, you'll want experiment carefully so as to keep enough of the dozens of different colours making up that texture, otherwise you'll end up with a banal plasticky looking skin.

You could try achieving an in-between effect using lighting, but that'd require a combination of softboxes set up quite a distance from the face (to minimise detail) and several carefully targetted beams picking out the most important features (enhanced contrast for eyes, lips, hair).

Technical observation, in case you haven't already spotted it: you seem to be working with a really, really, shallow depth of field. In that image, the skin on the cheekbones and heading up to/around the eyes is in sharp focus, but the eyes themselves, and the lips are slightly out of focus, and the nose is well out of focus. This actually enhances the look of the lips slighty (imo = simulated soft focus) but is too strong for the nose. There are tables and calculators online that allow you to see what depth of field you'll get with any combination of distance, focal length and aperture; you might be surprised at how shallow some of these are - literally a few millimetres of sharpness from front to back. Unfortunately, for portrait work, you can't typically use ultra-shallow dof to your advantage, seeing as our faces are built in annoyingly different planes.

Client management/business advice (following from other thread) : it would be good practice to exolain to every client (male or female) that your high-definition equipment captures all the detail in their skin, and they shouldn't be too worried about it when they get the first plate of images for review - once the shortlisted images have been processed, the photos will show them as they're seen with the naked eye. ;)
 
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CelticRambler said:
From the way you've phrased the second sentence, it sounds like you're also dealing with our in-built gender profiling. A younger woman with a ... "richly textured" skin is kinda ugly; a guy - especially an old guy - with the same would be showing "lots of character". I'd hazard a guess that the everytimes you're referring to are all younger women hoping to make an impression, rather than some wrinkly "aul' wan" who couldn't give a fk anymore what people think of her? :D
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No, the woman in that picture is over 50 years old, and I was already using a soft focus filter, tiffen digitial diffusion filter 1/2 strength, I believe it was around 3.2 aperture
 
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CelticRambler said:
Are you shooting and processing in RAW?
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First off let me say, I just opened that photo on my phone and it looks absolutely fine.
When I view it on my computer monitor or TV, the specular highlights are harsher than a cheese grater.

I don't have any software to edit RAW but I did shoot in raw+jpg
edit: downloaded Evoto that opens raw files, it has the same problem in raw format. zoom out and her face is spangled with white pixels
 
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Aww crap i figured it out, this was total dumbassery on my part.
I was filming a short film, switched to portrait mode afterward in a rush to take some headshots for her and send her home, didn't realize it overrode my color balance and shifted me back to AUTO, then colored in the light on her face. thats why i was getting the weird highlight / bright pixel effect.

:bang:

Used 7 day trial version of photoshop to open the raw files and shift the color balance back, so its fixed now

Edit again: Importing Raw has a default '40' detail sharpening in photoshop, sliding it down to 0 and THIS IS THE SKIN I WANTED. Finally.
The real skin without digital artifacts.

Thanks Celtic, you mentioned shooting in RAW twice, and you were right.
I listened to you the first time and made sure to have raw on, it definitely saved my ass

I did some very quick editing on the skin, the whole effect is moodier than I intended ( tried a new lighting setup)

1.jpg

drive.google.com drive.google.com
 
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sfoster said:
I don't have any software to edit RAW
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I would highly, very highly, recommend getting yourself a copy of Affinity Photo. A very reasonably priced one-off payment (think it's about $60-70 at the moment, you've just missed their spring sale :tear:) stand-alone, non-cloud based product with unlimited updates forever. I've been using (and am still using) the drawing and DTP products they launched when they were called Serif, so can confirm first-hand that even 15-years later the software works as well as it did when they released the last upgrade. My learning curve was much reduced because - unlike so many other software developers/publishers - they carried over the old Serif tools into the new Affinity line.

I've been using Affinity Photo v2.0 for about two years now (grabbed it on at the v2.0 promo price) and it has lived up to all the promises. Previously I'd been muddling along using a combination of Canon's own very basic image manipulation software and GIMP's freebie, but GIMP doesn't work with RAW, and edits destructively and doesn't use layers. With just a few exceptions, Affinity lets you work directly (or indirectly, your choice) on RAW images, and gives you absolute and total control over every change you make. You can stack layer upon layer upon layer of masks and filters and whatnot, and go back and tweak them whenever the urge strikes.

https://affinity.serif.com/photo/
 
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Okay, that gives you about 8.5cm/3 inches to play with, front to back. Just about enough for most faces, but close to the limit if you have a model with a prominent nose and you focus on the eyes. Might be teaching you to suck eggs, but remember that dof is spread equally in front of and behind the point of focus, so that's only 1.5in of sharpness from eyeball to tip of nose.
 
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CelticRambler said:
Okay, that gives you about 8.5cm/3 inches to play with, front to back. Just about enough for most faces, but close to the limit if you have a model with a prominent nose and you focus on the eyes. Might be teaching you to suck eggs, but remember that dof is spread equally in front of and behind the point of focus, so that's only 1.5in of sharpness from eyeball to tip of nose.
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I'm probably OVERTHINKING it, trying not to introduce noise.
My lights only get so bright, and I wanted to stick to the native ISO of 640, so that left me no option but 3.2 aperture.

I would have chosen 5, maybe I should have just uppoed the ISO and then applied denoise after.
 
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As you know, the golden rule for portrait shots has always been "focus on the eyes" ; but that really should be a more lenient "make sure the eyes are in focus" because it'd be a really weird head that needed any of the space behind the eyes to be in focus, but chins, lips and noses are almost as important as eyes. :crazy: So focusing on the bridge of the nose (for example) might actually give you a more appropriate depth of field. Having said that, it'll also depend on how sharp you want ears and hair to be.

I'd say your noise concerns are valid, so if you continue to find yourself working at the limits of sharpness, you might need to switch to an 80mm lens. Even a 50mm can be made to work with portraits if the face itself is nicely proportioned.
 
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