Lighting Diagram

School Portraits – Lighting Diagram – Processing

I don’t shoot a lot of portraits.

Sure I don’t mind and actually enjoy shooting portraits but… it’s always good to do things that stretch what I’m used to.

For the last few years I’ve been doing portraits for the school where I went each of my 12 years. Last week, during my spring break, I decided to go ahead and do this years portrait session.

I thought I’d tell you a bit about how I went about shooting portraits of about 45 people in just a bit over an hour…

Lighting

First off let’s talk a bit about how I set my lights up. I used three lights and set them up like you see above.

The main light was to the left, there was also a fill light was to the right and I had a hair light set up in the back right, aimed at the back of the students.

I didn’t light the background itself because I wanted to let it go to gray.

Once everything was lined up I had a test subject stand in… got things dialed to about right and started walking them through… averaging about a minute and a half with each student.

Post Processing

Now. To explain exactly how the post processing happened I first need to tell you a bit about my camera settings while shooting. I shot in manual mode and kept the settings exactly the same throughout the shoot. I also made sure to keep the lights at the same settings. This meant that almost all of my files looked quite similar – except for the different faces.

Because everything was quite similarly exposed I was able to develop one image in Lightroom to how I wanted it and then  use very similar settings on all the rest of the images.

Then I did a batch process to onOne Software’s Perfect Efex, these images were re-imported into Lightroom and then ran through another batch process through onOne’s Perfect Black and White plugin.

The final results were pretty much what I wanted… A bit of overall tweaking in Lightroom and they were ready to be exported.

Here are a few of the resulting images.

Thanks for stopping by! Scroll on down for the phone photos from the week…

Have a great weekend – Eldon Yoder

This Weeks Phone Photos

I’ve Been Reading

So I’ve been reading some before I go to bed these days… Two books by RC Concepcion – The HDR Book and Get Your Photography on the Web. The other book is on WordPress and is called Smashing WordPress.

Mello Yellow Bubbles

The Bottom of a Desk

At school this week we had a tornado drill… we were all supposed to get under a desk. So I did… and it was kind of tight.

Some Vine Ripened Tomatoes