I always use this time of year to reflect, and despite the obvious hurdles during 2021, it’s been an incredible year and I hope yours has been too! To recap and finish off 2021, last week I received confirmation of my first ever magazine editorial! After months of hard work, my beauty editorial was published with Vivier Magazine, and I couldn’t be more proud. Within this email, I’ve included some published and unpublished images; behind the scenes photos; a video of the day and the kit (including my lighting set up that I use to achieve my images.) I hope that you can use this to encourage you to plan your own shoot in the New Year!
We had 6 hours at PS studios in Wimbledon. You can follow along with the shoot here which walks through my go-to beauty light set up.
My go-to lighting set-up.
When organising our lighting set-up, our main aim was to create beautiful, soft lighting on the model’s face. We wanted even, soft glowing skin, and to capture the light reflecting in the model’s eyes – here’s how we did it.
We used a single light with a deep umbrella, which is perfect for creating a softer, and more even spread of light. I used the Profoto deep sliver umbrella in XL, along with one Broncolor Siros Light. Under the models, we placed a large reflector to help bounce the light onto their faces and created a more even spread and glow. We varied between using the silver and white sides of the reflector, depending on the look we were trying to achieve. Reflectors can also help create contrast in your imagery, so have a play around and see what you like best! Around the models, we used black Polyboards to help shut out any noise and to help add definition.
We had the light facing away into the umbrella, to reflect the light evenly and avoid hotspots. The light was positioned 1.5 metres away from the models at a tilt of 45 degrees, to avoid creating dark shadows around the model’s eyes. We set the light to approximately half power, but adjusted it, depending on the skin tone of our models. I shot on my Canon 5D Mark IV with a 100mm macro lens and kept the settings fairly constant at around F11, 1/60 shutter, and ISO 100. I always adjusted the external lights rather than changing the ISO on my camera. Keep an eye out on my Instagram as I’ll be posting more from the shoot!
So to summarise, we used –
Canon 5D Mark IV camera
Canon 100mm macro lens
Tethering cable and laptop – Shooting to Capture One
Broncolor Siros light
Extra large Profoto deep silver umbrella
Large reflector
2 Polyboards and coloured Colorama
If you get inspiration from my shoot, I’d love to see your results so please tag me! Finally, I’m wishing you all a very Merry Christmas, and hope you have a lovely winter break!
My Pleasure! Hope you find it useful 🙂