Lighting skills of children's photos

Lead: This chapter helps readers to finish the work of shooting children more smoothly through the background of lighting in the studio, the types of lighting equipment, the characteristics of different light, the actual shooting light level and the clever use of outdoor natural light.

Brief introduction of lighting skills

The study of lighting runs through the growth of children photographers, and different lighting will have different effects. As an excellent child photographer, you need to learn lighting persistently.

To learn lighting skills, you can practice from the flash. When you can skillfully use a lamp and a reflector to take wonderful photos, you can increase the number of lamps. However, most business children don't shoot more than three lights. Unless it is something very special. Because children have more uncontrollable factors than adults, more lights mean that children need to move the position of the lights slightly. This will bring a lot of inconvenience to shooting.

88mm f/7.11125s100

This photo was taken with three lights, one on the left, one on the right and one at a higher position in front of it, in order to make the hat on the boy's head shine.

95mm f/141160s100

This photo was taken with two lamps. There is a main light on the right side of the child and a light at the diagonal position behind it, so that the child can be separated from the background.

My usual studio lighting equipment

When taking pictures of children, the lighting equipment I use most often is as follows.

studio equipment

flashlight

The flash will be marked with wattage. The higher the wattage, the higher the brightness of light, but compared with children's photography, adequate lighting is more practical than more lighting. Moreover, some children are sensitive to light, so it is necessary to reduce the wattage of the lamp when shooting. My usual flash is the 500W gold cup flash.

LED lamp stick

When shooting location, I occasionally shoot with LED light sticks, and also use car lights, cell phone lights, candles and so on. Shoot children. Even once, when it was basically dark, I took pictures with the help of the faint moonlight.

So in photography, anything that can shine will be used for shooting. Try to use RAW format when shooting, because different illuminators have different color temperatures, and RAW format shooting reserves more space for later film adjustment.

attachment

In addition to lamps, I will also use accessories such as standard cover, soft box, radome, beam tube, soft umbrella and color film. To a certain extent, the role of accessories will be more useful than the lamp itself when shooting. Accessories can soften, harden, narrow and change the color of light according to our needs.

When I was training hundreds of children's photography shops, I found that most of them were very short of accessories. Everyone will invest millions to open a children's photography shop, but they are reluctant to spend hundreds of dollars on accessories. This was ok in the early days, but now customers' requirements and aesthetics are getting higher and higher. Many accessories are indispensable if you want to take photos that customers need. A clever woman can't cook without rice, so you still have to invest more in accessories.

The soft box I usually use is an octagonal soft box with a diameter of 140cm, which is sold in Taobao shop. You need to tell the brand of the lamp, because the bayonet of the flash will be a little different, so as not to buy it back.

The reflector I often use is a foam reflector with a thickness of about 4cm. You should choose a high-density reflector, which will be softer and more suitable for children to shoot. This kind of reflector is available in the decoration material market and is usually used as thermal insulation material.

Beam tube, commonly known as pig's mouth, can better capture the shape and outline of objects by limiting the irradiation range of light with a cone. Small honeycomb mesh can be made into light mesh, which produces heavy shadow and is convenient for special modeling. Mostly used in background, lighting and other parts that need to focus on light spots.

Familiar with the characteristics of light in different directions

Different directions of light will bring completely different picture effects to the subject. Let's talk about the characteristics of fairing, backlight and side backlight respectively.

Front lighting

Guang Shun is also known as? Zhengguang? , refers to the light with the same projection direction and shooting direction. When the sun shines, the children are evenly illuminated, and the shadows of the characters are covered by themselves, and the colors are softer. Can shoot the texture of children's skin and better restore the color of the scene.

When shooting indoors, most of them use Guang Shun as the main light, and most of them only use one main light to shoot; When shooting on location, when shooting some small fresh style photos, they will be shot with smooth light.

Photographs taken along the light are characterized by transparency, good color reproduction and high saturation.

150mm f/51125s100

Photographs taken indoors along the light show that the child's face is evenly illuminated and the soft skin is perfectly reflected.

115mm f/2.8 1/400s 100

Outdoor photos taken along the light, children's facial tone is softer, suitable for creating a small fresh style effect.

Backlighting

When our target. When the child happens to be between the light source and the camera, the light at this time is called backlight. Backlight can easily lead to underexposure of characters. In most cases, we will try to avoid shooting under the backlight condition, because the backlight condition increases the difficulty of shooting. However, backlighting can sometimes be used in some artistic creation. Experienced photographers often use backlighting to achieve some unusual visual effects. Backlighting is suitable for vividly displaying the outline of characters.

120mm f/2.81/320s 400

Outdoor backlight shooting. The child's hair in this picture has a unique effect in the backlight.

85mm f/111125s125

Backlight shooting in the studio. The protagonist in this painting is a silhouette.

Backlight is often used to shoot silhouettes in indoor or outdoor shooting. In some location shooting, reflectors should be used to fill the light. In addition, backlight shooting will bring difficulties to focusing, and we can choose manual focusing if necessary.

Backlighting

In portrait photography, the light-receiving surface of children's face and body only accounts for a small part, and the shadow surface accounts for a large part, so the color tone is heavy.

Side backlight lighting has a strong sense of space, and the picture is rich in color and lively.

Using this lighting method, the stereoscopic effect of the subject is better than that of the forward lighting, but the stereoscopic effect of the part of the image blocked by the shadow is still weak. It is often necessary to improve the brightness of the shadow surface and modify the stereoscopic level of the shadow surface, so as to improve the stereoscopic effect of the shadow part. It is characterized by lighting effect, and the illuminated objects are getting dimmer and dimmer. There are bright spots on the illuminated side of the object, which can well show the three-dimensional sense of the subject and make the photo rich in layers.

70mm f/3.2 1/250s 100

Side backlight is often used at night, when the light contrast is not so strong. In this photo, the child's face will be accurately exposed without a reflector.

70mm f/111160s100

Indoor side backlight environment shooting. The child's face in this photo has a strong three-dimensional effect.

In location shooting, when shooting close-ups and close-ups of people, the side backlight is sometimes used as the main light and sometimes as the decorative light. It is necessary to determine the light ratio according to the purpose of the side backlight to avoid a large area of the human face that is too dark and has only one bright line.