Studio Lighting & The Boring Side Of Fashion Photography

[68lbs]

Ok, have had considerable help from everyone here (many thanks already) setting up a studio at work (see here), and we're now taking our first shots. First up, I was hoping for some crit...

The images aren't supposed to be exciting. They are stock catalogue shots aimed at showing the garment clearly, in focus, under good lighting.

Setup is one of those enormous Lastolite HiLite backgrounds (kinda like a giant softbox) with two Lencarta 300J flash heads lighting this. Then another head camera right with softbox aiming straight at the manequin, and another head camera left with shootthru brolly. Don't ask me why one is a softbox and one is a brolly. We just have one softbox, so that's really the reason. As you can see... complete noob (or possible nob) here just experimenting.

Anyways, the thing that's bugging me slightly is the 'glow' from the background. I am guessing this is fairly unavoidable given it's illumination and our lack of space for moving further away from the background.

It's most noticeable on the sleeve shot (#2) where the back half is illuminated more than the front and even blending into the background in a couple of places. And also on the light knit (#3) where the sleeves are glowing!

Any thoughts, comments, most greatfully appreciated.

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Oh... all these are straight from camera, shot jpeg for speed of workflow and merely cropped to size and resaved. There has been NO PP, and the manequin was not moved to take the sleeve shot. This is all about speed of workflow... dress manequin, fire off one shot for each position, upload, crop, save. Job's done!

 

[Garry Edwards]

The lighting arrangement is fine as it is. The problem is that the background is overexposed and excess light is providing excessive backlight to your subject.
The answer is to move the subject & lighting further from the background. 50% more space should cure the problem.
If it doesn't, or if you can't increase the distance, just reduce the power of the lights in the Hi-Lite until you can just see the beginnings of less than pure white on the background and then turn them up very slightly.

 

[68lbs]

If it doesn't, or if you can't increase the distance, just reduce the power of the lights in the Hi-Lite until you can just see the beginnings of less than pure white on the background and then turn them up very slightly.

I found if I reduce the power more I start to get uneven illumination of the Lastolite HiLite and it's not completely blown. Meaning we'd have pp work to do in Photoshop to 'paint out' the dodgy bits.

Any recommendations for setting up the heads that illuminate the background? At the minute, they're at about the same height as the middle of the manequins torso, poked in through the side, pointed slightly forward with the large reflector dish on.

To set it up initially, I turned off the background heads, and got the two front flashes set up right to expose the manequin properly. I then switched on the two background ones and gradually turned them up until the background was blown. This is the correct method, yeah?

 

[68lbs]

Edit: Would we be better positioning the front flash heads almost directly in front of the manequin, but behind the photographer (at the min, that's me). That way there would be less light falling onto the sides of it from the front flashes?

 

[Garry Edwards]

Your setting up method was correct.
If you can't reduce the power to the background without losing the pure white then the only answer is to get more distance from subject to background - you can't mess around in PS given the way you need to work - and anyway that's the best solution.

When you talk about "At the minute, they're at about the same height as the middle of the manequins torso, poked in through the side, pointed slightly forward with the large reflector dish on." I assume that you mean with the standard reflectors fitted - you may find that using the lights without reflectors will produce more even illumination

Moving the subject lights to a less acute angle will probably help - try it and see - but may make the clothing look two-dimensional.