Introducing Matilda

Introducing my able lighting assistant; Matilda. Since arriving she has helped fine tune a lot of my lighting setups, but there are some comments:

Cons:

The reflective properties of her skin are not close to a real person, so while she is useful for testing out ideas, she can’t be used to fine tune lighting and camera settings, just concepts and general practice. Generally I have to bump up settings by about 2-3 stops to get the same light balance on a person.
Same pose all the time.
Scares my younger visitors and I get strange looks from the older ones.

Pros:

More patience than anyone.
Doesn’t need to eat.
Doesn’t complain.

This test was just to get some ideas on window and flash lighting to generate a moody portrait for an upcoming shoot. So I wanted to figure out what generated the look I was after – So I called in Matilda.

Matilda was placed as close to the window as possible, this was a completely overcast day so the light was already very flat, having her this close to the window meant that I would get faster light falloff and the back of her head head, hair would fall into almost complete shadow. I thought that this looked pretty boring so bit of a kicker light at the back should liven the shot up a bit.

A diffuser was hung right beside matilda and an SB910 speedlight was placed about 3 feet away and fired at the top right of the diffuser. Flash speed was adjusted from 1/16 power to 1/128th power to see what I preferred the best. I actually like no flash for the look I am after. Specific flash and lighting settings aren’t useful becuase I will have to change them for the specific location. However, I now have a starting point and I know what I will be doing in principle.

I tried this again with a silver reflector replacing the flash diffuser combination. The effect is shown here. this is by far my personal favourite set up for the look I wanted. I was sure that this could be approximated with a flash so I tried a few times; the result us shown below.