Written by
Bruce Roscoe
After doing a careful facial analysis on my sitter (Bob), we determined to short-light him, building some drama into this image. Bob is sitting on a posing stool with his front leg crossed over his rear leg. This helped keep his posture straighter and the book he is holding in a more stable position.
We used a black seamless for background and positioned the background light 44" from the background. Turning on the modeling light, we directed the beam more toward camera left onto the background. Once the main light beam spot was set, we triggered the flash to set the f-stop at f5.6. This step was done to add more light in the direction Bob's looking verses the backside of his head. We turned off the background light and began to set the key light. One point is, be sure to adjust the height of the key light to set a nice catch light in your sitter's eyes. (I always use a small light for my key light.) The Mini Apollo works great, giving you total control.
We also made sure we gave Bob a nice modified loop on the side of his nose.(A little trick I learned from the well known wedding and portrait photographer Monty Zucker, who has since passed away.)
We set the key light at f8. The next light we worked with was the hair light. We just wanted a touch of light on his head and didn't want to add too much light taking away from his facial features. The setting was f3.5. The light was a 12"x 36" strip light. Between the strip light and Bob's head, on a C-stand, we covered most of that light with a black foam-core. (This helped to give just a kiss of light on his hair.) The next light was a 12"x 36" strip light set on the floor to show some detail on the cover of the book he is holding, along with detail in his hands, making sure we had some light spillover to give a touch of detail on his hair (camera right.) To finish off the lighting for this image on camera right, was a Westcott 6 & 1 illuminator reflector kit. Using the sliver side, we bounced light back into Bob.