Clam Shell Lighting

What is clam shell lighting? Sounds kind of...fishy.

Pardon my lame pun. I'm in a hurry here.

Clam shell lighting is a technique where you use two umbrellas to like a subject, and you position the umbrellas like a clam shell. The shell opens toward the subject. The advantage to this is that you can have very very even lighting on the subject and control the strength of shadows on the face by changing the exposer levels on the strobes in the umbrellas.

For my set up, I used two 560s at 1/128th power for the lower umbrella, and 1/64 for the upper.

Camera setting were f1.4, 1/200, and ISO100. Wanted shallow depth of field for a soft image and no ambient light leaks.

Here's the results.

In Lr, I upped enhanced the eyes with my normal technique, and brought down the clarity across the board. This lightened things and made it look really soft. Other than that this is what the lighting looks like out of the camera. 

This is a really short post, more tomorrow. See you then.