Portrait Session with Edy – Philippe's blog

I hadn’t done a portrait session for a while and luckily my friend Edy was up for trying some new set ups.

The first set up was inspired by a photographer I really admire, Jerry Ghionis. It is a very dramatic portrait of a young lady.

In my collaborations with people in music and the entertainment business, I learned that many of them like dramatic portraits and lighting, so I believed it would be a good idea to add this kind of lighting set up to my repertoire.

I started the session with Edy with that set up because I (foolishly) thought it would be relatively straightforward to recreate. It turned out that the light placement is quite tricky, especially with speedlights (no modelling light). I suspect Jerry Ghionis’ picture that inspired me was taken with a continuous light source (either natural light or his Ice light).

After quite a bit of trial and error, we got some good shots in the bag. I was very pleased with them and so was Edy.

Dramatic portrait of young lady — I didn’t want to background to go totally black so I put a light on it with a blue gel. I did edit the background in Photoshop to get to this final result.

We then moved on to a more traditional set up against a dark background. Two lights, one speedlight in a soft box camera right and a bare speedlight camera left and slightly behind the model to provide separation with the background.