Finding light: trial and error (behind the scenes series)

I promised to show some behind the scenes photos. So here there are  some. It is a text-laden post. If you don't like it, just wait for  tomorrow when I will publish the results of the session I describe here.  The series published today is only interesting in context with the text  below.

Sometimes a woman appears and offers herself as a model  for a shooting, and it's now or never. I have never seen her before, and  soon she'll be gone again - in this case, back home to Russia.

She  was tall, slim, long-legged, simpatico, but she did not have that kind  of a "sensual face" that inspires me - a pure matter of personal taste,  of course. But ok, I'll take a look...

So she undresses, I ask  her to move a bit in front of me, turn around, to bend over, and my  cruel photographers eye registers very slim legs, a very small bottom  that in some positions looks beautiful, round and firm, but - because of  being so slim - in many positions loses its roundness and takes the  shapes of the bones below. A perfect bosom.

I also see that she  is almost completely shaven, except of that "landing strip" to show the  direction... But she has no spots like most of the shaven girls do and  that would cause me a lot of displeasing retouching work: sitting hours  and hours in front of the screen, having the spots enlarged to maximum  size (and unattractive detail) to remove them from the image... But her  private parts look beautiful, very smooth and big and round in  comparison with her small butt cheeks and the slim thighs.

Although  beautiful in many ways and although for sure a Russian dream woman for  many, not exactly my dream model. But now she's here, and what do I do?

I  decided to try to capture precisely her slender curves and her  comparatively large pussy in black and white images of strong contrast.  After explaining her what I wanted to do we went to my guest room and I  prepared to flashes. One with a middle-sized softbox for a soft general  light and one with a hard reflector to produce the contrast.

For  many years of experience I know what light makes it easy to take  beautiful shots, but it seems that I have kind of a "professional  defect": I (almost) never use that beautiful light setting. It bores me.  I always search for "another" and "new" way of light, a light setting  that I haven't used too much and that fits exactly on what I want to  achieve in this session.

Images with hard contrasts are not easy  to take. One has to be very careful. With every little change in  position the shadows fall somewhere else. They can destroy the shape,  hide exactly what you want to capture, throw "stupid" shadows on the  background that destroy the composition of an image. The same applies to  the highlights: they can burn out the details just as you might know it  when taking a portrait of your friend on a beautiful summer day at  noon: the stunningly blue sky appears white, the hair looks eroded, the  forehead is a white plain and the mouth disappears in the black hole of  the shadow of the nose. And each and every small wrinkle and roughness  of the skin gets enhanced by brutal dark shadows.

Maybe,  probably, there exist masters of light who simply take the lamps or  flashes, put them in position, and - wham! - the light is perfect. But  not in my case, I must confess.

So, as I show you in this series  of "behind the scenes" photos, I fist put the "general light". It can't  come directly frontal or it would erase all shapes, because in the  two-dimensional image the shapes get visible through the difference  between light and shadow. A frontal light produces no shadows, so that,  for example, the roundness of the breast would simply disappear.

So   I put the softbox a little above the height of her head (image 1),  more or less at the position of her feet (I later want enough light on  her pussy, so the flash must come from down somehow) - but uhhh! how  boring! And the thigh receives much too much light. You can see the  further changes of position of the flash when you pay attention to the  shadows on the wall.

Ok, move the flash a bit lower and a bit  more up in direction of her knees (images 2 and 3). Not bad. Can you  please turn around? Oh no! (image 4) Now all the body lays in the soft  shadow, the only light is what reflects from the walls and the ceiling.  I've put the flash much too low. Grr.

So, a little bit higher  (image 5). Not bad. The shapes of the body are beautifully pronounced,  now. But, hm, just the beautiful pussy is half hidden in the dark. And  what when you lift the leg? (image 6). Ok, height of the flash is ok,  but position must be a bit more in direction of the feet (image 6 to 9).  Ok, not bad for the general light, just a bit dark, lets give a bit  more power to the flash. Uups. That was too much! (image 10). Ok, now  I've got it (image 11).

Now I light the second flash with the  hard reflector, too, with which I want to produce the strong contrasts.  (image 12). I don't want it to flash directly between her legs (again:  that would flatten the rounding), so I also put it near the main light.  But, yeah, I though so, now the pussy disappears completely in the  shadow, zzz (image 13). Again, a bit higher and a bit more in direction  of the feet (image 14 to 17). Mmm, so far I quite like it. Let's see how  it looks in black and white.

Argh! See those terrible two  shadows on the wall? So, let's play around a bit with the individual  power of the two flashes. Make main light stronger, contrast light  lower, and vice versa. Again change a bit the hight and the position of  the two flashes... (black and white images)

Yeah! I've got it!  (second to last black-and white image). We started at 15:14h and now  it's 15:29h. All this trial and error happened within 15 minutes. For me  it's a short time because I am working. For the model it must be a long  time because she is just there, waiting... But now we can start with  the session, find the poses, the image compositions... (last image)

I  took the last picture of this session at 17:45h. After having achieved  the contrast images that I had in mind I changed the light again to a  bit softer to take some portraits and some close-ups. Right now I am  editing the whole session and there will result at least two series (of  which one will be for "Power"-patrons only). I hope to finish editing  tomorrow so that I can upload the series.

All photos of this  behind the scenes series are the absolutely unaltered jpg-versions of  the camera, except size and watermark, of course. For the edited series I  will use the raw files. You'll see the difference :-)

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