I'd just bought a Wacom Intuos2 graphic tablet the day I took this shot which was actually the primary motivation for doing the shoot, so I would have some new material to try it out with!ĭodging and burning with a Wacom tablet is like going from a manual to an automatic car. I used my usual post production process on this - some tweaking in Lightroom then straight into Photoshop for color corrections and dodge / burn. You can see the how this shoot progressed from start to finish here: This is how I work - building lights up, taking test shots, tweaking things, adding / removing things along the way. You can see a little red bloom on the left of the final photo which is a reflection of the red telescopic light in the monitor. The monitor serves no purpose - I literally just pushed it out the way to frame the shot, this would have bounced some light around as well. Combine this with a wide lens and you get the bokeh effect visible in the final picture. Just by looking at the BTS shot above, you can see where the plastic picks up the light and reflects it at specific spots. plastic packaging! I literally took the plastic insert the figure came in along with another similar one and used these to create the bokeh field. Sat on camera left of the figure is a very powerful LED light firing straight behind her at. Here's a shot without the background bokeh lights. With these lights in place, I framed the shot and dialed in the intensity of each light to get the look I wanted. This counters the red and blue lights and creates more natural color definitions and shadows from above. I used this on a pretty low intensity and held it with my hand directly above the figure's head - literally just out of shot. Sat on the right of the desk is my F&V R300 LED ring light which is super powerful. This creates more light around the lower edges of the figure and increases exposure. I've put some foil under the figure to bounce all the light sources back up and illuminate her from below. You can just see the same softbox on the left, but that's also turned off. I've also got a big softbox out of shot on the left (not the desk lamp which is turned off) dumping some white light over the whole scene. The bluer light is closer because blue light is a weaker wavelength than red, these are fairly hard light sources but diffuse a little through the gels. The closest key lights are two telescopic Ikea lamps with opposing red and blur gels. Here's a behind the scenes shot of the setup for this picture.įor this shot, I built the lights up on the Star Girl figure first in the order you see above. Suffice to say, producing the effect is trial and error whatever lens / aperture you're using. You can produce it at higher apertures but that requires playing with the distance your lights are from the lens, and thus how powerful they are. You need a fast lens that you can shoot at a wide aperture to pull this off - F2 or lower for the most part. I thought about doing some monitor backlighting with a nice star field, but I figured this would be a great opportunity to create some bokeh backlights in the shot.īokeh is a beautiful effect produced by lenses -any point of light that is out of focus will produce blooms of light. I've been shooting DC's 7" line of figures and I've been trying to come up with a "look" for each shot.įor Star Girl, the theme I came up with was somewhat inevitably, stars. What I'm most pleased about is the lighting on the figure, which is the result of a lot of trial and error, knowing what's not worked from previous shoots and knowing what's going to make a difference as I'm lighting the subject. The pretty background lights aren't the key aspect of what I believe has improved in this shot (though they help). One of the great personal moments as a photographer is realising you've improved at the end of a shoot.įor me, this shot is one of those moments: Learn how to create bokeh in this case study shooting DC's Star Girl figure
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