Aerial acrobat Sanna Vellava. Lighting: One gridded speedlight camera right for key and blocked partially by a flag. Fill is a gridded speedlight from camera left. There's also a gridded speedlight (dialled way down), camera left, lighting the backg… — Aerial acrobat Sanna Vellava. Lighting: One gridded speedlight camera right for key and blocked partially by a flag. Fill is a gridded speedlight from camera left. There's also a gridded speedlight (dialled way down), camera left, lighting the background.

Sanna Vellava is an aerial acrobat and a friend I have met while working on Pirjo Yli-Maunula's projects. Her most recent collaborations with Pirjo are The Tower and Pessi ja Illusia, which enjoyed another run this spring.

Sanna was in town for a series of performances with another aerial acrobat, Ilona Jäntti, and I asked her to come sit for a portrait. I gave her all of two seconds of notice, too--I asked her after a performance if she could make it the next day before another performance and she was game.

I have photographed Sanna many times while performing and rehearsing, but this time I wanted to make a strong portrait with her and planned a few lighting scenarios accordingly.

Sanna in The Tower and Pessi:

Sanna has very striking eyes and I wanted to accentuate them in my portraits. (She also had a cool new haircut.) I decided I'd light her with grids and keep the light hard and the shadows strong.

One gridded light for key, one strobe with just the reflector on the background to push it to white. The room is white and not too big and the seamless stretched across the floor so there's plenty of bounced light which filled her shadow side in thi… — One gridded light for key, one strobe with just the reflector on the background to push it to white. The room is white and not too big and the seamless stretched across the floor so there's plenty of bounced light which filled her shadow side in this set.

From the white seamless we moved on to a more elaborate set-up, which I explained from a technical perspective in the caption for the image at the top of this post.

I have long been impressed by Dan Winters' work. He has a very distinct way of lighting his subjects. Winters is famous among photographers but works constantly and does a lot of jobs for Wired, for instance.

Sometimes I like to go through his stuff and try to approximate his look, lighting-wise. (Not that I can reach his level of artistry. Dude builds his own sets from the ground up, hammer and nail and all that, and could probably if not construct a space shuttle, at least fly one in a pinch.)

Winters often works with hard light and in a way that gives a very heightened, or stylized look to his subjects. It also gives kind of a soft look to hard light: the transition from light to shadow is still quick but the shadow is not as deep. Using the flag also gives the shadow's edge a gradation.

You can see the look I was going for in his portraits of, for example, Tom Hanks, Natalie Portman and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Hard key, flag to block it partially, hard-ish fill. And something on the backdrop.

Winters typically uses a ring flash or a big softbox or a combination of both for fill, coming directly from camera position. I eschewed the big light source, and since I do not own a ring flash, I used a gridded speedlight instead. I didn't want to hit the fill from camera position but rather had the fill light to camera left, fairly close to on-axis but still to the side. I could knock Sanna's shadow out of the frame but still get that 'hard fill' look.

You can see the two shadows, one from the key and one from the fill under her jawline. The fill also gives her eyes a catchlight even if she's facing away from the key light.

The two shadows are more pronounced in this image.

We did a bunch of variations:

So it's not a 100% facsimile of Winters' style (and what would the point be, other than an exercise? You would also need 4x5 film if you really wanted to nail it.) but it's inspiration, another look to create. I felt Sanna projected great serenity and a thoughtful calmness to match this look.

Not to be content with our white seamless and shaft-of-light drama we went for something else entirely:

Hard light for key? Yeah, I dropped that and got a gridded softbox, camera left. Rim light is a gridded speedlight, camera right.

This was a test shot and I was still adjusting the lights but I kind of liked this. I added the black collapsible backdrop after this shot.

And there you have it! We were also trying to figure out something, er, acrobatic to convey that she is, in fact, a circus artist, but we couldn't come up with much on the spot. We'll plan it better next time.