This shooting with lovely Estelle was actually never planned as such. I had her in the studio for a beauty shooting - and I also had some plastic left over from a water shot the day before.
First, I covered up the floor with white paper and then positioned Estelle and the camera. After wrapping her into the plastic foil, I pushed 5 Siros L (at very low power) under the edges of the plastic, just outside the picture frame. Of course, the modelling lights were switched off!
These five Siros L had no light shapers (just bare bulb) but were covered with blue filters. Using them like this guaranteed the widest possible spread of the light. The white paper on the floor helped too. I did add two or three additional highlights (at lower intensity) in post-production.
Only using these lights, the face already got some light on both sides - I just needed some additional fill-in for the centre of the face. This was the most difficult part of the shooting:
If this fill-in light is not strong enough, the face looks very harsh and "dirty". If you illuminate the plastic around her too much, you lose the blue colour and everything turns greyish. The solution was to place a beauty dish with grids very close to the model. Only like this I could have a precise, selective light on the face only.
I was using a digital medium format camera with a focal length of 80mm. The camera settings were f11 and the shutter speed 1/125s at ISO 100.
by Urs Recher
