Photo Challenge #1

Some time ago I came up with the idea of doing photo challenges for myself. The point here is to come up with an idea for a photo (or more often take inspiration from someone else’s work) and try to make it work. Hopefully, this series might be helpful for anyone who’s starting in photography and is looking for any kind of hints. Also, like most of our posts it’s sort of a diary for myself so that I don’t forget the early stages of my hobby that is photography.

This time the task, or the end result, was a pretty straightforward one. I wanted to achieve a typical studio look where the background is completely white and the subject is well lit. Sort of like the United Colors of Benetton adds.

The biggest problem here is that I don’t have flash lamps (apart from the built in one) so this is how we got about doing it.

Ginger was a natural I might add :)

We recently bought a white background but that’s rather obvious as we don’t have white walls. On the left is an Arri 600W film lamp that I was lucky to buy recently. Its main purpose is to light up scenes in movies but here it worked really fine lighting up the white in the background. On the right is a small studio lamp that seems to give a lot of light at first but I find it too weak for this setup. Plus it has a different temperature so the subject might turn out blueish. We also used a small blend to light up Ginger from the bottom.
As we don’t have a flash, the built in one had to do so I took a small metal plate and bounced the flash light of the ceiling and it worked out fine.
Here are some examples and the final results with some Snapseed and Photoshop work done on them.

As you can see there wasn’t enough light to capture the whole subject so I decided to focus on the upper body instead.

Have a lovely day!

Kamil