My neighbour Minh asked my help with lights and lighting – he wanted/needed photos of his sons. So I invited him and set up some lights for portraits with a white background. Then I took a test shot with my Olympus E-520 and the 50mm macro lens:
After that, I handed the radio remote to him, and he took shots of his sons using his Canon 600D camera with the same settings which I had. We looked at some of his in-camera jpg files, and they had nice and pleasing colours and lots of “pop”, so Minh was happy.
Didn’t do much to my Olympus raw file, but I cropped it into a 5:4 format which I often do when using an upward “portrait” format. Otherwise, some minor curve and contrast tweakings, that’s about it.
Technical info: the main front light was my Simock E300 studio strobe bounced into a white reflective umbrella at 1/4 power, the light onto the white background was my Yongnuo YN-460II on a small tripod at 1/16 power. That gave me a reading of f/9 on the background, and of f/6,3 on the foreground. So the cameras were on f/6,3 and 1/160th of a second at ISO 100. Subject/background distance was about 1,5 meters. Later we also used a white reflector from camera right (but not in this test shot).
The boys will come back soon to play with Zuleikha. But first, everyone has to get some sleep.
Thanks for viewing.
