How to shoot a good black model?

Many photographers think it is a good idea to keep the portrait absolutely dark or absolutely bright. They don't confuse dark and bright themes with lighting techniques unless there is a clear reason to do so.

We all know that we can't always abide by this rule, except that blonde models wear dark clothes and brunette models wear light clothes. Professional portrait photographers usually discuss with models what clothes to wear in advance, but few people will follow the advice of non-photographers. They will be surprised at how many people will agree with the photographer's advice and then appear in the opposite clothes, unless you cut the picture to only one face, because both situations force you to mix light and dark elements. In other occasions, the main light source can be moved to one side more to increase the shadow area of bright portraits to strengthen the facial contour, or the shadow in dark portraits can be minimized to make the skin look more shiny.

If most shooting elements are the same color, there will be less clutter in the picture compared with the face, which is especially useful for photographers who have just learned to shoot portraits and have not learned to fully combine lighting, posture and cropping, and can't make a uniform composition.

8.4 Shooting models with dark skin

We know that photography may lose some details in highlights and shadows. People with almost no light skin color will lose their highlights. We rarely encounter such problems, but some people with dark skin will be dark enough to have potential shadow details.

Some photographers will increase their exposure in this situation, and sometimes (we must emphasize, sometimes) this strategy will be very effective. For example, models have dark skin and wear dark shirts and coats. It is safer to increase the exposure as much as possible to supplement the light loss absorbed by the skin.

But if the model is a bride with dark skin and a white wedding dress, increasing exposure will only bring disaster. The face was exposed correctly and good shadow details were obtained, but the clothes were absolutely irredeemably overexposed. The bride is looking forward to keeping this photo and beautiful wedding dress for 20 years, but there is something wrong with you!

Fortunately, there are better ways than just increasing exposure. The key to successfully deal with dark skin is to increase the direct reflection of the skin.

Human skin only produces a small amount of direct reflection, but the direct reflection is most obvious on dark surfaces. Therefore, increasing direct light is a way to increase the brightness of dark skin models.

Another thing to remember is that the larger the light source, the greater the angle of light projected on the model, so that the larger light source can fill the angle system that produces direct reflection to a greater extent. Therefore, when shooting a dark skin model, a larger light source can produce a larger highlight area on the skin without adjusting the camera exposure.

However, it should be noted that a slight increase in the size of the light source will hardly improve it, because the shape of a person's head is close to a sphere, and the angle system that produces a lot of direct light is also very large. The bigger the light source we use, the better the effect. We may still need to increase some exposure, but not too much, so as to take a good picture of the bride's face and wedding dress. If you don't look at it in order, I suggest you look at the circular metal object shown in Figure 6-29 or the glass object shown in Figure 7- 10, and then look at the angle system of direct reflection of the circular object.