LYesterday I asked if anyone cared to do a breakdown of the lighting on this image and I got some great responses via email, the blog and on facebook!
So let me walk you through my thought process …
The first thing I did was to put her with the sun to her back. It was about 10am so it made almost a 45 degree angle on her left shoulder (her left shoulder = the right side of the image). You can see a little bit of the sun actually reflecting on the inside of her arm from her dress. No reflector needed, we had a natural reflector in the form of her white dress.
It’s a pretty decent image, but I wanted to lift some of the shadows from the side of her face that is closest to the camera so I added an off camera light from the right side of the image / camera right. The light was held high at nearly the same angle as the sun, but it was in front of her body instead of behind it.
If you compare this image with the final one you can see some minor adjustments that I made. The most obvious one was the pose itself, I got rid of the flowers because I wanted the focus to be squarely on Christy. My camera angle also changed, which meant more of the tree behind her was incorporated in the final image. (To be honest, I really like the composition of the first image better , but the pose and angle of her neck in the second image is much more elegant). The image was also warmed up in post processing, but that was it – it came out of camera lit exactly the way I wanted it and after 5 seconds in post it was ready to view!
