Shadow play
GET SET UP TO CREATE YOUR BOLD-COLOURED SHADOWS BY USING SEPARATE RED, GREEN AND BLUE LIGHT SOURCES
1 White background
A white background is best for this effect as it will show the colours of the various and vibrant shadows clearly. We used a roll of white vinyl here. If you don’t have a dedicated backdrop to hand, like this, you could always use a plain white wall instead, or pin up a white sheet behind your subject.
2 Studio flashes
We need three lights working in combination to create our coloured shadows. We’ve used three studio heads on light stands here. If you don’t have studio lighting you could equally use three speedlights or continuous lights; any type of lighting will do, as long as we have three separate sources.
3 Flash trigger
You’ll need to be able to fire your flashes off-camera, so either attach a sync cable, use a wireless trigger and receiver, or use an on-camera flash. Here we’ve used a hotshoe-mounted speedlight to trigger the studio flashes, which are each set to optical remote, meaning they detect the speedlight and fire at the same moment.
4 Coloured shadows
By fixing red, green and blue gels to our three lights our shadows are tinted yellow, cyan and magenta. This is because each shadow blocks one or two of the three colour gels, so it’s a mixture of the remaining colour. Red and green create yellow, red and blue create magenta, and green and blue create cyan.
5 Extra flash
If you find the lighting on your subject’s face needs something of a lift then try adding in an extra flash. In this case, we’ve used a softbox. The light is angled back towards the face from behind so that it doesn’t fall upon the backdrop – if it did it would actually dilute the shadows in the shot.
6 Position and height
The position and height of the lights will determine where the shadows fall, so experiment with the angles until the shadows look right for what you want. The height of the lights also impacts the shape of the shadows. By setting the three lights diagonally here, the shadows become angled as well.