This week I had a pleasure to collaborate on a photoshoot in creating multiple different studio lighting setups at our Baldoyle home studio, for three distinctive makeup looks.
The goal of the session was to photograph commercial makeup looks and light the images accordingly. We did include a more dramatic editorial fashion portrait look as well.
The makeup looks were designed and applied by Eve and our amazing model for the shoot was Agnes K.
One Look, Two Styles
For the first makeup look I created two lighting setups. The first is a classic dark grey background with a beauty dish as the key light, complemented with a strip box on the right to add some separation. The background is actually white and made grey by controlling the spill of light, only softly hitting the background.
The second setup utilizes a large softbox as the background, providing amazing rim light wrapping around the model. The key light is a beauty dish on the left. This setup really brings out the glossy eye makeup with eyes closed.
How The Light Can Change Everything
Our next look was a darker eye, suitable for a variety of occasions. This is a nice demonstration of how a business professional portrait can be turned into a fashion editorial with the lighting and outfit choices.
The editorial version was created by adding a blue gel to a large softbox, effectively turning the white background blue and adding blue into the shadows on the model. The key light is an optical spot with adjustable shutters, allowing to create these slices of light, carefully directed on the model. A strip box on the right is adding a bit of separation from the background.
High Key Beauty Lighting
The final look was a glossy one with wet hair. In order to highlight the effect I added two umbrellas on top right and left behind the model, close to the background. This creates a beautiful soft hair light while lighting the background at the same time and adds a ton of global illumination. The key light is a beauty dish with a reflector underneath, creating a classic clamshell setup.
Finally, mostly for fun, I wanted to test my Canon 100-500 mm telephoto lens in studio to create some closeup shots. Otherwise everything was shot on a 24-105 mm at 70-85 around f9-11. The shoot with three makeup looks and several lighting setups took about 5 hours.
