Shooting People on Dark Background

Tandy Sean — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:42:25 +0000

I’m putting together project right now with a personal brand, website, and headshot for Ricarido Gimena, Vancouver based Opera singer with the Vancouver Opera Company. I’ll be following up this post with the remainder of project elements. This one will focus on the shoot. The goal was to get some good studio shots for the site and for the head shot to give out at auditions. We worked on a dark background and experimented with the lighting. Since it’s for Opera, the more dramatic the better! Read more for deatails on the lighting setup.

A great lighting scheme for a professional, dramatic image

This shot chosen as the main image on the site. A much warmer look was picked for the 8×10 headshot. I could have warmed up the image with a warming filter but I chose to keep it cool as it went well with the directional look and the high lighting ratio.

The lighting scheme was simple enough. Spot on the background at about the same intensity as the highlight assuring that the texture in the background would come through. Highlight was 1.5- 2 stops over the main light to get the 1:4 ratio I was after. I wanted this to be a dramatic shot which is why the higher ratio. Some tweaking of the RAW files and retouching work brought the image to just where I wanted it.

3 light set up for a dramatic effect on dark background

TSADesign » professional photography lighting dark background portrait headshot

Shooting People on Dark Background