Joseph helped me out tonight by being my goofy model. I was testing a few things… 1) that my lens isn’t going bad… I don’t think it is anymore. 2) how to get whites white! Ahhh! That’s really the whole point of this lesson.
So, what did I do differently? I had my key light at about 5.5′ high at a 45 degree angle to Joseph’s left. I used my spot light without it’s snoot or color correcting filter pointed through the reflector directly to his right.
I’m bidding on a boom (on ebay) so I can perhaps get some real backlight on this.
Anyway… I then set an aperture of f5.6, got my exposure set — always on skin and then stopped my aperture down 2 stops. I got white! Woohoo!
I was initially working with Ron’s Sigma lens, but it’s too slow. I was getting shutter speeds under 1/50… can’t do that with mini moving objects! I need them to be 1/100 at LEAST!
So, I switched and put my f2.0 Canon fixed 35mm lens on and tried again. Tada! But I was worried about the focus. Seemed to work just fine this time around. Going to have to really watch that though.
I repeated the same process, starting at f5.6 and stopping down to f4.0 which is what *I* like to use for portraits. I did find that as Joseph got higher or lower it wasn’t adequate and post processing was required to lighten it a bit, by increasing or descreasing the exposure compensation.
I shot RAW, so I could do some serious post processing on it — to my delight! So anyway here my three favorites and final products from my practice tonight.
