STEP BY STEP Shoot with a softbox
How to light your model with one source
1 Use a large softbox You can get this look with any large softbox – and by large, I mean a softbox that is at least 36 x 36 inches or larger. For me, when it comes to softboxes, the bigger the better, because the bigger the softbox, the softer and more enveloping the light becomes.
For this look, I chose my favourite go-to softbox, which is a 53-inch Elinchrom Midi Octa – but again, any nice really large softbox will do. You can do this look wonderfully well with either a strobe or a continuous light source like a Westcott Spiderlite TD6 as long as you use (here it comes) a really large softbox .
2 Where to stand You can see where my shooting position is in this behind-the-scenes shot. I’m standing directly in front of the softbox; it’s just a few inches behind me. The fact that my head sticks up into the soft box doesn’t mess with the result at all.
Because the big softbox is behind your shooting position, it’s farther from your subject than you’d normally place it – well, certainly farther than I’d normally place it, because I usually like it very close to my subject so I get really a soft, wrapping light. When it’s this far back, you have to crank up the power quite a bit.
I took this shot at 1/2 power on a 500W Elinchrom BRX strobe. Most of my studio shots are taken with the light set to 1/4 power or less.
3 Blowing the hair To give the hair some movement, we used an fan that mounts directly on a light stand. My favourite (shown here) is the Blow It fan from www.blowitfans.com; it runs around $99, and has three different speeds.
Besides being able to control the height and exact position of the fan, one of my favourite features is that it’s actually pretty quiet. Plus, it’s easy for the model to reposition the fan if it starts to get irritating, or if they’re wearing contacts and just need a break.
3 Camera settings This image was taken with a 70–200mm f/2.8 lens, at a focal length of 70mm, since this was just a tight-in head shot. The ISO was 200: I generally try to shoot at the lowest ISO I can in the studio, to get the cleanest, noise-free files, and 200 was the lowest native ISO for the camera I was using.
I shoot in the studio in Manual mode, so I can set the shutter speed and forget it. The shutter speed was 1/125 sec, which is kind of my default shutter speed in the studio. I think of it as my ‘it won’t get you into trouble’ shutter speed.
The aperture was f/10, which is a good f/stop for situations where you want absolutely everything in focus in a portrait. I focused on the eye closer to me and held the shutter button down halfway to lock focus, then recomposed the image and took the shot.