Suvi V. One speedlight on the background and a flashlight for her key.
I asked Suvi to come to a sitting in my SFAW and she took me up on my offer. She wanted to get some headshots for her resumés and whatnot, which we did, and then I wanted to make her portrait using light painting.
The problem with my pop-up studio was that it was a regular office, complete with white walls and three windows with standard blinds. So controlling the light became an issue. Ideally, you would want to work in pitch black darkness when painting with light so that there is no other light source to contaminate your exposure. I did have some black fabric to cover most of the windows, but there was still some light sneaking in. This was in August and the sun was reflecting off of a white building across the street, which I used to my advantage on another session. But here it presented a problem.
I set the camera on a tripod and framed the photo. The exposure was a leisurely 8 seconds. Being that my f-stop was 16 (ISO 100) in order to have a completely dark exposure with the tiny bit of ambient light in the room, I had to have a slow shutter speed to have time to light her with the flashlight and have it register for the exposure. This meant that poor Suvi had to sit really, really still.
Light painting is a technique that still carries an element of the unexpected in times of digital photography. You will see the end result on the LCD display right away, of course, but there is a hand-crafted aspect to it and no way to make two exposures identical. I also like the stylized look of it. It's a little unrealistic in a good way: when pulled off successfully, it's really cool.
We started off with Suvi's eyes open. I wanted to have a connection to the viewer and she was a great sport, but after having me blast her eyeball up close with a Led Lenser flashlight a few seconds at a time for a dozen images, she politely said she really could do without having that thing burn up her retinas. I took the hint.
There was a nice stillness to the frame and I thought it might also work really well with her eyes closed for a still, calm, serene portrait. And this shot was it: she really hit her expression and managed to keep still for the required seconds.
There is slight motion blur, but I think it contributes to the image rather than takes away from it:
I think I blasted her face with the flashlight for 3-4 seconds at a time, requiring her to keep as still as she could.
Here is a sample of the images we shot. It is pretty hit-and-miss especially when a sitter has to be still with no support. I used a small flashlight on her on and sometimes used my fingers as a gobo between the beam of light and her. The background was lit with a gridded speedlight, which fired at the beginning of the exposure and then I would light various areas on her with the flashlight for a few seconds at a time.
The color temperatures here are all over the place because some of these have post-processing and some don't because I got lazy and didn't feel like fixing everything for this blog post. But it does bring me to post-processing!
I shot all the images with the camera's white balance set to flash. That made the flashlight really yellow, but I could get a cool shade on the background, because I wanted to have that color contrast there between blue and yellow. But just how much blue and how much yellow?
After some experimenting and tweaking in Lightroom, I decided on a color temp of around 4500 and a Tint of +11. I also made adjustments on the HSL panel and all of this resulted in a turqoise-ish or aqua-ish tint on the background and a slightly toned-down orange for her face:
And Bob's your uncle!