Striplight part 2

Settings:
1 Vivitar 285hv
flash at 1/2 power,
at telephoto zoom,
through a striplight (20x90cm),
Striplight was vertical,
top was about 1.5 meters height and bottom .6 meters,
.5 meters in front of the subject's face, and slightly behind subject.

A website I frequent is having a self-portrait competition. I noticed from the many submissions so far, they were all very different from the classic portrait techniques. When I was in art school, every time a brief was given, it had an immediate obvious interpretation, but was open to more experimental stuff. Every member of the class would try to push the brief to it's utmost limits, and do something as obscure as possible. This left the class interpretation relatively untouched, and I routinely tried to work on something well done, but that fit the more obvious example. I found it fun to try something basic and simple, but try to work more on quality rather than getting lost in originality purely for it's own sake.

I wanted to use my homemade striplight again (I have a real one ordered on the way, I love striplights now). I originally tried some straight on shots, like this:



And while I liked it, and it looked how I envisioned in my mind, I decided to try a few more poses. Again, I ended up getting my favorite of the shoot (the first image) when I tried this. I also found that the different poses ended up working with different crop formats.

One thing that I like so much about striplights, is that you get soft lighting, but can still reveal volume and shadows. It's only really soft in one dimension, which gives tons of room for interesting lighting setups. I was originally planning to get this main strip light setup correctly, then I was going to pop in a 2nd flash, but it worked so well as is, there was no need.

Striplight

I built a striplight using one of the many DIY guides on the internet, and wanted to try it out. It's best used when you want to light a cylindrical shape/object. The light comes out evenly from a long, thin softbox. Had I used an umbrella (round light source) in this same way, the "raking" of the light would not have been the same.

Here are the setup shots:



Settings:
2 Vivitar 285hv
main flash at 1/4 power,
at telephoto zoom,
through a striplight (20x90cm),
Striplight was at 2.5 meters height,
directly overhead subject.
background flash was at 1/16 power,,
wide tele zoom setting with fresnel diffuser,
light stand was at 1 meters height,
directly behind subject,
aimed up at background.

The goal for this kind of setup, was to create rake lighting on a body. Rake lighting is where the light comes from an extreme, near-perpendicular angle to the details, so that they are revealed by light and shadow. This is one reason that on camera flash is so ineffective. It lights the details from a parallel angle, hiding shadows.

This goes back to my lighting video. The lightsource affects the object based on it's size and distance. You have to imagine a sphere, it's center on the subject, and it's radius the distance between the subject center, and the surface of the light. The size the light takes up on the surface of that sphere will dictate the light's look.

On this shot, I wanted to reveal muscles. With a less harsh light, I wouldn't look nearly this defined. An umbrella would have put a lot more light coming from further forward, filling in the shadows, and ruining the rake affect. This lighting setup would also be very affective for a reclining pose, since the light would run along the length of the body. It's best to think of striplights as better for lighting cylindrical shapes, when you want to reveal volume evenly.

This example image should show the difference in how a round light source behaves compared to a long thin light source.



And one more from the shoot: