How I Took These Pregnancy Shots
Photography Experiments
I’m writing this blog post from Boston, where we’re expecting the arrival of Grandchild #3. We expect to take family portraits immediately afterward, so I packed a very portable studio with me (which I’ll detail below).
We took a few token full pregnancy shots. I really wanted to do something a little different. Like the shot above, which I had never tried before. It took me a few tries to get it right. Here are all of my mistakes in getting there, in glorious color.
First I tried just putting a flash on a bookshelf and have it point to behind the subject. The shot below is the result.
What happened? The flash is going out in all directions, way more than what I need. At first, I thought there was too much stuff around the flash, so we moved it to the hallway and I had my wife hold the flash behind my pregnant subject:
Not much better! I need to somehow narrow the beam more than just setting the flash’s zoom to 70mm. Normally I’d just wrap some construction paper around the flash as I’ve done before, but this time I used a speed grid similar to the kind sold by David Honl, except this one was homemade using a collection of cut straws, made by Lumodi beauty dish president Brandon Cruz. (I now carry these in my camera bag.)
This effectively narrows the beam so that the edges of the beam just touched the outside of her head:
Progress! Okay, so that’s the head. But I want the body as well. Fortunately, I brought with me a 2nd flash and a 2nd grid. (Doesn’t everyone carry these in their camera bag? :-) )
Even better! The beam is so narrow, though, that it’s only skimming the subject’s front but not her back. And here I had a choice: I could continue to try people’s patience by experimenting with flash placement and distance (to widen the beam to cover both the front and back), or I could use a shortcut and move the bottom flash so its light skimmed only her back, and then merge the pictures in Photoshop, deepening the blacks in the process. That’s the path I chose. The back shot and then the final shot are shown below.
Gratuitous stats: A55, Zeiss 16–80, 1/160, f/4.5, ISO 100.
My Portable Studio Parts List
As promised, here’s what I carry with me when I have to travel light and still get winning results. Please remember you can travel even lighter and spend even less money by using human light and diffuser stands as described in my blog on the 5-dollar studio.
- A portable Tripod
- Black cloth as a backdrop
- An Umbrella reflector from Midwest Photo collapses down to 15" (I chose a reflector umbrella rather than a shoot-through to make sure that 100% of the light from the flash ends up on the subject. Handheld flashes are inherently weak. I prefer to utilize all of their output.)
- Umbrella Swivel hardware
- Minolta 5600 Flash (although you could use ANY wireless flash)
- Minolta Off-camera shoe OS-1100 just to physically mount the flash
Careful placement of only one diffuse light source (in this case, to the right and pointing to the subject’s face) can really add drama to your pictures!
Until Next time,
Yours Truly,
Gary Friedman
Originally published at friedmanarchives.blogspot.com on September 3, 2018.
