Lighting setup advice for a horrible location

Hi All,

 

I have to take about 120 head and shoulder portraits of new uni students in 3

days time and have discovered the location is horrible for photographs. It's a

large indoor hall with massively high ceilings, very little natural light, and 8

dim fluorescent lights high in the ceiling that make people look sickly.

 

I've always taken head and shoulder shots in a fairly well lit environments

where the natural light was sufficient. I'm a little panicked now because whilst

I know the basic theory, I'm pretty inexperienced when it comes to artificial

lighting and flashes.

 

I'd like some advice on what sort of lighting setup I require to take these

photos. I don't want to go overboard with the setup (these photos only go into

our online internal phone directory), however, I don't want the students to look

like zombies either either. There will be a white backdrop behind the students

and ideally I would like it to appear white in the photos so I'm guessing I'll

having to shine some sort of light onto that as well. I've listed the equipment

I own at the moment and am prepared to hire lights/stands/reflectors/umbrellas

etc although I'm not sure whether I need to or not.

 

Canon 300D

580EX flash

50mm lens

28-135mm lens

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Ben -

 

As described, you're looking for a high-key lighting set-up. You'll likely benefit from 3 strobes total - two cross-lighting the background, and one key light for the subject --- likely want to use a reflector on the off-side to get some definition on the subject's face.

 

He deals mainly with hot-shoe type flashes, but check out www.strobist.com --- GREAT resource.

 

-Mike

Just rent two basic monolights with two white umbrellas and stands and do a basic portrait lighting setup. The umbrellas will also light up your white background nicely.

One big umbrella above the camera will surely be adequate for some student mug-shots...

keep the students about one metre from the backdrop (to prevent shadows, but to keep the

backdrop fairly white)...

Thanks to all three of you who have responded so quickly!

 

Elliot - so are you saying that I would have the flash mounted on my camera and angled up to an umbrella above my camera?

A D-I-Y reflector, foamcore slab, or Lastolite reflector (http://www.lastolite.com/

originalreflectors.php) straight over your camera bouncing your 580EX in its hotshoe,

should give adequate light, and a whitish background. Another reflector below and in front

of the subject opens up the shadows under chins, noses, etc.

 

Angle them carefully.

 

Have fun!

"<i>whitish</i>"... isn't that just a euphemism for grey? <p>Do more research on this, and look for a link to the Strobist blog. <p>You can do this (with one more hot shoe type strobe, two stands, an umbrella and two adapters, two hot shoe adapters with PC sync terminals and an optical slave for one of your two strobes, plus a sync cord (or the remote cord for your 580EX)... but maybe not in three days. Good luck (which only happens when Preparation meets Opportunity). I'd love to hear the back story on how this came to pass... t

'Elliot - so are you saying that I would have the flash mounted on my camera and angled up

to an umbrella above my camera?'

 

Er, you could do it like that, but better to take the flash off the camera, and put it on a light

stand with an umbrella attachment. Add a decent size shoot-through brolly (40 inch or so),

and position it just behind you and above camera.

You need to make sure the overhead lights dont give you a different colour cast, turn them off or if you are shooting digital you can white balance compensate for them.

One thing I'm surprised no-one has mentioned is to get a "grey card." Once you have your lights set up put the gray card where your subjects will be, then take a normal exposure. You then use the image of this grey card to establish a custom white balance in your 300D. Good luck!

Thank you all for you advice. Now that the day has come and gone, I am very happy to report that the lighting was a huge success!!

 

I ended up renting 2x 250W flash heads with soft boxes. As it turned out, the store only had 1 250W head and so gave us a 500W one instead. Setting everything up was straightforward and I did many test shots. We quickly discovered that for my situation, the 500W was way too powerful. In the end, after much experimentation, I simply used a single 250W flash head with softbox positioned 1 metre above and slightly to the right of the camera.

 

The results were stunning. In fact, after the College staff saw the student photos, they started requesting that their headshots be retaken with the new lighting as well. I've still got heaps to improve with my photography and understanding of lighting, but for effectively a 3-day crash course in lighting, I'm estatic about the results, as are the people I took photos of. So thanks again to everyone who gave advice!