How I Lit Thanksgiving
Here's the kitchen. Note that the light is nice yellow "soft white", with a healthy hint of green because they're fluorescent. We're going to harmonize with the lights, rather than completely replace them.
The fill light is the first one I set up. It's a battery powered 550EX flash (so are my other two lights), with an amber gel so it blends with the kitchen lights. It doesn't appear amber because I've already changed my camera to tungsten white balance. So the light appears perfectly white. I also set the distance relatively far away from the dining room; the farther away you set the light, the more even the distribution from front to back. If you put your lights too close, the front row is overexposed (too bright), and the back is underexposed. That ended up happening anyway, but it was within fixable range.
I shot a gray card on the table. It's slightly underexposed, because we're going for a fairly small fill ratio. To put that another way, the fill will be just slightly less bright than the key light. That will produce a less contrasty shadows, which I prefer for most portraits. I set the camera to a custom white balance based on a tighter shot of this gray card.
The key light is set up to camera right. While the fill light was a bounced white umbrella, I use a small 30" silver bounce for the key. This gives me the greatest possible power for an umbrella. Focus point is set 1/3 of the way into the group, which is just a bit closer than this seat.
In this seat, there's actually a Rembrandt pattern--the cheekbones are both lit, but there is a shadow wrapping the left cheekbone. Most of the other chairs will be loop lighting, which is forgiving of all facial types and lighting angles.
By itself, a small 30" key light would produce very hard shadows. The larger fill light softens those shadows. We're at about a 3:1 key to fill ratio, which means the shadows are noticeable, but subtle.
I just wanted to make sure that every single seat was lit. With only three battery powered lights, I'm going to be limited in how even I can make it.
This is actually the darkest seat in the room. I'm going to try to enhance this seat in a bit with rim lighting and eventually some post process brightening. If I had one more light, I'd probably using it to set up a second key at the 3 o'clock side of the room to light up the back row a little better.
Fill light was set up first, then key light. We're going to rely on the bounce-around flash lighting for the background light (a blessing and curse of umbrellas). Now we put in the rim light on the cabinets, just out of camera.
So we got a rim light here, but there's a bit of camera flare--the flash is shooting some rays of light directly into the lens. You can see the flare at the top left of the picture. You have to redirect the angle of the rim light so that it doesn't hit the lens, or place something in between the lens and the rim light to block the flare. This is called a gobo. We didn't use one this evening.
OK, all lights are firing, and there's a nice rim light on the back row of seats. You can see it in the subtle rim of white light outlining the left side of my head. Without boom stands and additional lights, I'm unable to get rim light in a much better position. So we'll settle on rim lighting the back row, which is closest to the cabinets, and therefore needs the most separation from the background anyway.
Here's the rim light in its final position above the cabinets. Note the obvious lens flare when the light goes directly into the camera.
Here's the reverse angle, showing the key light on camera left and the fill light straight ahead. The key light is completely whited out because it's at 1/2 power. The fill light is at 1/4 power, and set further away, so you can still make out the ribs. The empty stand to the right of the fill light is where the camera will sit. Light stands make wobbly tripods, but they'll do in a pinch, especially if you need it really tall.
Final test shot of the kitchen. The lower left hand corner is dark, but that wasn't visible in my LCD screen, unfortunately. Note that because we gelled the flashes to tungsten and set the camera white balance to tungsten, the light above the table appears white, not yellow.
The finished shot in the camera. The 3, 4 and 6 o'clock positions at the table are about right, but everyone else is too dark. The ideal way you would increase the depth of illumination is to back the light further away and increase the intensity to compensate. The flash has little room to back up, and no more power to spare, so we'll fix it in post.
Graduated filters were applied diagonally to darken the bright areas and light up the dark areas. Cropping, some minor cloningon my forehead, and vignetting (darkening the edges) finishes the look. Yes, I probably could have done a little more to perfect the shot, but we were hungry and wanted to eat. That's often the outcome of well-planned "on location" lighting; spend an hour setting it up, and five minutes actually shooting. And every once in a while, there's food waiting for you after a good shoot :)
AnnaliseBrentCatherineGeraldHollyJaimeJoanKimLanPresleyThanksgivingVudining roomfamily portraitkitchenloop lighting