My good friend and Makeup Artist Lorri Mitchell and I have been working together this past month to update our beauty portfolios for 2009. One of the models we’ve had the pleasure to work with was Gwen. Working with Gwen was great. We were able to rock a number of setups and walked away with some great photos.
When shooting for beauty, I like to light so the model’s skin has a bit of pop or glow to it. On the other hand, I don’t want to wash out all the detail in her skin, such as her pores, and end up with a plasticy look to her skin.
To achieve this look, I used a three light setup. The main light used to illuminate Gwen was a strobe fired into a large white satin bounce umbrella. The umbrella is positioned above and close to the model, taking advantage of the wrap around light a bounce umbrella produces. To soften the shaddows created by the high placement of the strobe, a white reflector was placed below Gwen, just out of frame.
The white seamless background was lit with two strobes fired into shoot through umbrellas positioned at an angle on each side of the background. Since I wanted a light that wrapped around Gwen and not just a white background, I set exposure on the background 1.5 stops higher than necessary. This wrap around light helps to add to the softness of the photograph. See the lighting diagram for a visual on how everything was setup. Check back next week for a peek at another one of the setups we did with Gwen.
Thanks for including the lighting diagram. It helps see the light setup. Good info here.