Portraits and Light

Click image for gallery and full-size photos

For some time I've been doing standardised portraits to encourage manufacturers in being able to give more of an idea of the character of each of their head sculptures. In the summer, I use a large room with a lovely window on the south side, reflect the light onto the face, and use a reflector on the other side to fill in the shadows. One has to work fast with the moving sun and moving light, but in a way the variations add to the lifelike quality of the result.

However, both Joyce at OR and Star at SM have sent me some heads to do, and the weather is very variable and the angle of the sun so low that it's difficult to work with. Artificial light became a necessity. But buying lights need not be expensive and I use cheap old equipment. An old manual f1.8 85mm lens, with broken diaphragm wide open

This lens is really wonderful to get a good perspective with portraits and the stiff manual focus means that each photograph is taken at the same distance, so all the portrait photos are sized to scale of the head.

I bought a couple of umbrella light kits with a big flourescent bulb. These cause a lot of light spill and for portrait work we really want to focus the light into a beam, without necessarily lighting up the whole room. So I replaced the bulb with a big 15W LED reflector light. This allows the umbrella to focus the light more tightly. But it's not powerful enough to replace the sun as the light source. 

The other light I use has a fabric reflector box in front of the light, and sockets for four bulbs. One can get units that convert a socket into three or four, and allow the lights to be directed. Bending these to one side enables most of the light to be near the side of the reflector so concentrating the light more in a beam and avoiding lighting up the background too much.

Even despite the quite blinding light coming from that lamp, it's not wholly effective to be reflected back from the other side to relieve the shadows so I use the umbrella lamp to bounce off the reflector as well. You can see how the main lamp is directed to leave the background in shadow.

The result is a stage set fit for photographing The Queen.