Simple lighting setup with Elinchrom Bx 500 Ri

Some weeks ago a good friend came visiting and one of the evenings we spent making a couple of portraits of her. She is a happy camper as you might notice :)

Half way into the photo session Terra felt she needed to investigate things

Terra is one curious dog. Nothing goes unnoticed at home...

For those curious how the pictures were taken- a chart of lighting setup and some more details on how the pictures happened inside the post.





Used the Bx 500 Ri kit with two small (60x60) softboxes from Elinchrom to light the whole thing. Backdrop was a white bed sheet hung on a bar used to hang clothes . To avoid light falloff while lighting the background from the side with just one strobe, I figured I could just as well light it from behind. So, I moved one of the Bx 500 Ri units to the back so that light coming from it would cover the whole bedsheet and juiced it up to have a nice white background. The other strobe was just to the side from the camera axis. And that's it- nice white background and soft light for a full length portrait.

If you think your photo studio is tight on space let me comfort you- here the shooting space width was around 1 meter... I used the 70-300 lens and went all the way back into another room to avoid seeing the sofa or TV which were on both sides of my view path. Not much luxury with space, but it worke.

As post-processing goes, nothing major was done here. In the picture with Terra a proper pixel-peeper would notice some wrinkles of the bedsheet visible (on the right side of the frame). I left them to illustrate how much postprocessing was required to cleanup these pics. Just default adjustments for curves and a little saturation added; plus background cleanup where needed (as it was just minor wrinkles to clean up, all I did was add a new layer, increase exposure for it and mask the wrinkles). In the first picture I additionally cloned the white background over the TV stand that was on the right side to add more space in the picture. All post processing performed in Bibble 5.

//M.

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