Diffusing and Redirecting Light

posted in: Lighting | 0

Sometimes we have a subject and we want a certain background and the light is coming in from a totally wrong direction like in this case. We wanted to use the beautiful mountains as a background and incorporate this seniors Harley Davidson. Image #1 is one we took for fun for Mom who is holding the diffusor. The “bad ” news is that the sun is coming in to his right and hitting him very strongly Picture #2.

First thing we is to put up a difussion screen to “turn” down the sharp light on his shoulder and head #2. The sun is pretty low, so we can diffuse all of him + the whole motorcycle with a Lastolite diffuser, if the sun had been really hi I would need my Sun-Swatter or two people on ladders etc etc.

After diffusing the sun coming in from his back/right (Pic #2) we added a Photoflex Silver reflector (Pic #2&3) as a main light making sure it was stronger then the back/right light. Why silver? Because the color of the sun was getting pretty warm probably around 4300K otherwise we might have used a silver/gold or gold reflector. I wanted him warmer to add more depth and dimension in the image. The colder background is also helping.

Pic #4 is just to show a sample of a full body shot. See how different the background is in image #1 and #4 because of the different camera stand point. I love sun, clody days have it’s charm, but sun gives you the punch 🙂 Have a great weekend.

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