Today in the studio we did a similar shoot to last week but using ambient lighting rather than artificial studio lights. We used camera settings of ISO 400, f 4.5, daylight white balance. This week the gorgeous George volunteered to model starting with -
1. The light coming in directly from one side:
In the head and shoulders shot, the light is soft and subdued but one sided, with the shadow making the right side of George's face indistinct.
2. George sat facing the window so the light fell directly on his face - here the whole face is illuminated and his features appear much sharper.
3. George turned around so he had his back to the window and we used a white reflector so light his face:
Here the reflected light is softer than when the light was falling directly onto George's face.
4. Now with the light falling from directly above and George looking up the photograph is taken from slightly above....
...the pool of light falling directly onto his face is more forgiving and gives a softer look without shadows.
After we had finished the shoot I realised that I had left a polarising filter on my lens which clearly affected the colour of the images making them much darker than they should have been (school girl error!).
The white balance on the last image above was c5,000K. Using Lightroom 2, I first adjusted the exposure and fill light to produce a better grey balnced image:
then I adjusted the white balance to cool (3,200K) and warm (10,400K) to see the effect. Cooling the image gives an unnatural blue tinge to the background and to George's face:
Warming the image gives a softer, more natural and flattering look than the cool image:
The screen shot below highlights the white balance tool in Lightroom:
your technical process is really well illustrated.
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