Three speedlight lighting setup for edgy portraits

I really like Joel Grimes lighting technique of placing two kickers at 45 degree angles behind the subject to get a very cinematic feel. I’ve been following his work on flickr and he is truly a master of lighting people in a modern and edgy way. In these slow winter months, when venturing outside guarantees phlegm taking residence in ones bronchus, I have to rely on my living to craft images in.

The finished image

As I started assembling my lighting setup I realized that I would end up one light short. You see I only have 3 speedlites – 1 Canon 580EX and 2 cheap LumoPro LP120’s. To get the look I wanted I needed one extra light: two kickers from the sides, one background light, and one overhead in an umbrella to light up the front of the face.

I set up the background light first, adjusted the strobe power so I would get a nice deep red and then continued to the kickers. The left was bleeding light on the well, so I wrapped it in a bunch of black tinfoil… all is well so far. I shot of a couple of test shots and I was getting a well lit background with a silhouette of myself lit by the two kicker lights. Here’s the bummer – I’m all out of lights and my face is still recessed in shadow with practically no detail visible.

Zipdisc to the rescue! I have a couple of zipdiscs that I purchased at Calumet. They’re basically round reflectors / diffusers that have swappable skins that change the color of the reflector and the purpose of the disc (diffuse or reflect when the skin is off). I planted yet another stand right next to my camera tripod and brought it up to around ~7.5 feet, with the zipdisc hanging up top at a 45 degree angle, with the top leaning towards me.

Test shot, still no cigar. I was getting some fill, but it wasn’t …filling enough. I moved the flashhead of one of the kickers a tad upwards, so that the feathered strobe would still clip me, but the beam would be focused on the zipdisc above. Finally, I had my exposure that I could start my post processing work on.

The prints come with nice hooks and hanging rope attached, have a little logo of ChicCanvas on the back and are mounted on white pieces of wood. One weights around five pounds, so the hanging options are practically a non-issue. I am pleased with the service and the quality of the prints. It will be interesting to compare them to the print I have just ordered from CanvasOnDemand.com.

Basic exposure. All I did here was adjust the levels and fill to get my crummy fill light to be a tad brighter on my face.

Adjusting the focus point of the photo with contrast and brightness. A layer mask on the face and some feathered paintbrush action later I have my point of interested isolated a little better.

Liquefy! Made top of head and ear smaller, and blew up my lower jaw to make myself look like a brute. Next I pushed back the neck, expanded the biceps, and widened the arm slightly. After I was more or less done with the shape I applied some local contrast to the image bringing out the harshness in the skin (this can be done multiple ways – my duplicating layers and playing with the blending modes, mostly).

All I did here was adjust the tone of the image and bumped up saturation just a bit.

The fun stuff. The knife got extended to make it as over exaggerated as the size of my jaw, moved the forearm out to the left to make it look even wider, and painted out the hair to look more like a Mohawk and not just a receding hairline.

With a really large soft brush I dropped some shadow around the picture to isolate the key element even more. I am still undecided if it was a good idea to remove the highlight on the left arm, but I felt that it was detracting my eye from where the action was.

Some bloodshot eyes never ruined a picture… painted on some vessels, and added a color blend layer with red on top of the eyeball. Click the image for the final large version on flickr.