MissAniela

Shooting fashion & beauty at Studio Time

In a recent blog post I reviewed Studio Time’s ‘Portrait Lighting’ day workshop. Studio Time are based at two studios in London, one in Barking, Essex, and one at London Fields, where my course took place. The first course was an introductory look at fashion and portrait lighting, and this second course I attended, entitled the Fashion & Beauty Photography Workshop, took an advanced look at studio lighting techniques.

Through the day, myself and the other students were guided through a series of lighting set-ups, starting with the most basic, and adding further twists to each set-up to achieve various effects. However, throughout the course was always a focus on simplicity: on using the most minimal lighting equipment to achieve the effect. The tutors, Tony Thornton and Martin Gomez, who have years of professional and commercial photography to their name, were eager to establish their mantra from the outset: less is more.

On this day, Martin Gomez led the course. After being fully briefed on the ins and outs of tethering our camera to the computer, making each image delightfully pop up in Lightroom, and learning a few things about my Mac that I didn’t know (i.e. how you can preview any file by hitting the space bar!) we got stuck into the first of the lighting setups from the printed guide we were each given. Starting with two softboxes, we were shown how to light the model, Anna, with a white unlit backdrop. This led to the portraits above and below (which I have since further enhanced in Photoshop with vignetting, curves and colour balance).

By not lighting the background, the focus is placed purely on the model, drawing the viewer’s attention intimately toward her face. I was able to exaggerate this in post-production with applying vignetting, which increased that sense of intimacy more on some images than on others.

I found that the images also worked well in black and white. We moved into angling one softbox slightly, which filled in the light from one side.

We moved onto another look altogether for the images below. The set-up was a key light used with a beauty dish, and two kickers: one to highlight the hair, and one to give a faint hotspot. The background was changed to black, and a white or gold reflector bounced an intriguing sheen back at the model near her arm.

Up to now, the lighting set-ups had been quite conventional in terms of fashion and beauty. I felt enlightened to learn how to set up each lighting scenario, and for every set-up, as you can see, we each had sufficient chance to sync our DSLR up to the lights and take our own images of Anna at leisure. This was an advantage to having a small class size – everyone has chance to contribute to the preparation of the equipment (I wanted to ingratiate myself with the lightmeter, in particular, having zilch experience with one) and then to direct the model to produce their own creations from the set-up.

In the images below, I got excited when we had a go at creating some ghostly doubling exposures. Whilst triggering the key light caught Anna in full detail, by doing a 1-second exposure (instead of 1/125 as we had been shooting throughout) we could make a double exposure, only because of the ambient light in the room. This is where I started to feel stimulated in terms of studio creativity. Learning new things is always good, but my aim is to get to that stage where you feel you have learnt to use the tools well enough to actually do something interesting, something that could potentially have your stamp on it. The long exposure was Martin’s idea, and we all had a go at it, but it was the notion of fiddling with the conventional shutter settings, and producing something unexpected through the use of motion – the notion of motion! – that was my personally enlightening moment.

We looked at using beauty lighting with a lit background, ’sports’ lighting that is used to accentuate muscles by lighting the subject from each side. Then, for the shots below, we used a key light with beauty dish for full-length shots with a shadow behind the model, which I decided worked well in black and white.

The course also showed us how to take advantage of the studio itself, and to turn the lights onto the ceiling of the studio to have the light bounce down in the manner of daylight. Unleashing out a fresh roll of white background halfway across the studio floor, Martin showed us how to position the camera at the correct angle in order to achieve a natural and vibrant lens flare that made for fresh, sunshine-like images of Anna. Being very different from the last shots we took only a few minutes earlier, I learnt a great deal about the versatility of using a studio and how one or two lights, knowledgeably positioned, can go to great lengths for diverse looks. A gel was used in the shots below, to give a certain pink cast from one side.

As I said in my last review, studio lighting is very new to me, and just being shown the ropes to studio equipment is certainly not enough to transform me overnight into a confident expert. I feel as though it will take steps to discover, for myself as an artist, the potential to use this new, massive and baffling array of tools. It’s comforting then, after my two courses, to be reminded that a studio is ultimately a place to take photos, and a place that aims to make it easier to get the photos you want. Like going to a DSLR from a compact, so many new buttons of control become available, that it is easy to feel initially bewildered, until you realise that the control being offered is there to bring you closer to what you want. One problem with that is having to know exactly what you want – I have always favoured the spontaneity of shooting in natural light and not knowing exactly what the results will be. The blank canvas of a studio is still daunting in terms of implementing my creativity within one – but these two courses have been a headstart. Thanks Tony and Martin! If you are in a similar position and want to learn studio lighting, I highly recommend paying their website a visit and scooting along there yourself. It’s on the doorstep of London Fields rail station and if you drive, there is free parking at weekends or ring ahead to arrange a space on a weekday.

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Studio Time runs courses on DSLRs, fashion and portrait, and creative lingerie shooting. It also offers one-to-one tuition and studio model days in which you can book slots to shoot the model. You can read all about the courses and check out the dates for the next courses here.

More general info on hiring the studio here.

Tags: beauty, course, fashion, lighting, london photography courses, review, studio, studio lighting, studio time

Posted in Uncategorized on April 8th, 2010 | 7 Comments | Tweet This!