Recent Portraits

I have recently been increasing my knowledge and understanding of portrait photography by shooting some different shots of various friends and family within my conservatory studio. This is not an ideal location due to it's size but is fine enough to produce some good head and shoulder shots

I have been using a mixture of flash and studio heads to produce the various results and shown here are some of my latest portraits

Here I used 2 Bowens 500 heads to achieve this shot, the main key light was set at a power level 2 using  an F Stop of F8. The second light I used at power level 1,whch was used as a fill light also at F8. It's very impotant to try and keep the catch lights in the eyes at either the 2 or 10 o'clock positions. This mimicks the natural light of the sun whch gives a more natural looking effect to a portrait

I used to 2 umbrellas for the shot, 1 used as a shoot through to give a nice soft difusion and the second to defuse the fill light whch gave some quite pleasing results

Again I used the same setup as above but introduced some colour to the hair using layers in Photoshop. I enhanced the image even further using various software's to smooth the skin tones of the model

The shop above was taken using 2 Canon speedlightlights whch I think gave quite pleasing results. They lack the power ang light quality of studio monolights but still give outatanding results

I have recently purchsed a new lighting system whch will enable me to shoot in studio or out on location as the system is portable. I will be mixing these new lights with speed lights and I am hoping to increase my lighting experience even further. I hope to be shooting lots more portraits outdoors when the weather gets a little warmer and the days become a little lighter