Don't Even

It's that time of year again...for the Christmas cards! My house decided to do a house card this year, so we went out a bought ugly sweaters for it. For $11 I got a horrible turtle neck and vest, can't beat that. I often wonder why I live with the people I do...

But anyway! We all got dressed up as ridiculously as possible, and I started setting up lighting.

The first thing I tried was a three light set set. There were two strobes on either side of the group, and a ring light in front of the lens. The idea behind this was to light the whole room and white sheet with the two side lights, and then fill in the people with the ring light.

There were two problems with this. First off, the side lights kept making really terrible shadows on us. The room was really small, so there wasn't really much we could have done about that, and still have had the background all lit up.

So then we did something awesome. We took the white backdrop, hung it to the ceiling, and used it as a gigantic soft box. There were two strobes behind the backdrop, both a fairly high power. That backdrop diffuser became the key light, and the ring light filled in the rest.

Rings lights have magical properties, as you can really tell in this photo. Skin is super soft, and just the very subtle shadowing from the key lights creates some awesome lighting. It's not awesome for just regular portraits, I think it's a bit to....odd. The shadows halos the ring light make are just too much to handle on the mustard yellow walls. Why is that even a good color to paint walls??

But in the spirit of the ugly sweater photo, it works beautifully. Really weird lighting, terrible background photo, and even worse attire.

Editing this, I had to up the exposure quite a bit. Didn't look at the histogram enough, as usual. But no matter. Then I set my black and white points by holding option on the white and black sliders. Other than that, there wasn't any adjustments I did. The photo needed to be a terrible as possible.

Enjoy.

See you tomorrow!