This evening during our WACC photo seminar we used flash to explore and emulate lighting conditions and how they affect a portrait. The four sample cases below simulate how direction, distance and size of the light affect the portrayal of facial features.

The first shot shows how on-axis (same direction lens is pointing) light flattens facial features. The next sample used bare flash in a close-up from-above pattern to emulate how overhead sunlight might affect a portrait shot. We get hard and deep shadows. The third sample shows what overhead, but highly diffused light does by bouncing the flash from the ceiling. With this shot we get soft shadows, but also unflattering shadows for the eye sockets. Finally, we brought light from a 45 degree angle to the camera and from above the subject. We get softer shadows and more flattering modeling of the face.

You will notice that for all these we used a fairly high ISO (2000), allowing enough ambient light into the shot to demonstrate how different light sources can mix and affect the overall color of the photo, and this is particularly apparent in the third sample shot.

Our thanks to our willing model for patiently putting up with all the strobing.

This weekend I did a little event coverage during The Spirit of Art reception at the Whittier Art Gallery. I spent most of my time, however, talking with folks about the work on display. Here are some photos I hope will give you a glimpse of the happenings. If you missed it, you can still check out the exhibit during the gallery’s regular business hours, Wednesday to Sunday, Noon to 5pm.

While good skin tones under controlled lighting are fairly straightforward, mix your lighting sources or allow them to get a color cast, and things get sporty. In this sample portrait we have a case where both of these unfortunate stars align when a little ambient from CFL lightbulbs and flash bouncing off lime green walls produce less than pleasing skin tones when we allow the camera’s Auto-WB to make sense — or try to — of the lighting situation.

Knowing I’d have a problem, I noted the hat’s white flower was pretty close to true white. Unfortunately, using it as white balance reference takes things way too far. In essence, the basic problem comes from way too much magenta. We’ve traded too much green for too much magenta, and neither produces pleasing skin tones.

To get there we have to free-hand a bit. There’s no formula, only tweaks until we get a result that seems reasonable. After playing a bit with adjustments, I arrived at this result.

In the end it doesn’t matter that this shot was taken with the Nikon D7000 — and it was. Neither Auto-WB nor a white reference got the job done. Achieving proper skin tones comes down to judicious editing that aligns with personal preference.

After noticing that many professional studio portraits not only have soft light, but also a certain glow to them, I tried post-processing with a technique I recently discovered, which more or less mimics what one can do with a soft-focus lens or filter. You can take the effect as far as you like, but I prefer a moderate application where I play with opacity, curves and even some light masking to customize the look for each photo’s needs. What do you think?

Original	With soft focus glow

Ever since I switched from Nikon software, ViewNX, to Adobe Lightroom, I’ve been meaning to check how portrait color handling matches up. In my most recent portrait session, I took one test shot with my subject and a color chart under the same lighting I used for the rest of the session. This allowed me to calibrate the white balance (WB) in post-processing by sampling one of the gray patches in the chart.

The first photo shows how the camera (Nikon D300), using the Portrait Picture Control would have rendered color using the Auto-WB setting. The second shot shows how sampling the gray patch in ViewNX 2.2.5 adjusts the WB. The change is subtle: just a slight warming up of the skin tones. The final shot is processed in Lightroom 3.6 using its Portrait camera profile. I notice a change in how shadows render — lighter in this case — but color, especially on those all-important skin tones for portraits is pretty much the same.

This is good news for me, because all along I’ve feared that though Lightroom’s more versatile and robust features offer many benefits to my post-processing, I was losing the fidelity that a Nikon software product would yield. I’ll let you be the judge, but at least for this example, where light was fairly well controlled, I don’t see much of a difference.

This weekend I had the opportunity to do a portrait session for a favorite chorus singer of mine. Here are my favorite shots from the session. Let me know which of these you prefer.

Some technical info: Key light (SB-900) was at camera left, roughly in the simple 45 degree pattern in reflected umbrella; fill light (SB-600) was right behind and above camera, also in a reflected umbrella; and a third light was used as bare flash (SB-600) zoomed, either as a rim light (1st 2 shots) placed behind the subject or as a hair light above and behind subject at camera left.

On the next post, we’ll be discussing additional technical details for this portrait session.