Mindmap of ideas

Gel Lighting Beauty Shoot - Straight Images

Gel Lighting Beauty Shoot - Technique

Key Light - The main light used to light the subject

Beauty Dish - A circular dish which is flexible - if it's white it is more diffusive, if it is silver it has more contrasted directional lighting.

Diffusion Sock - The cover placed on the Beauty Dish, it makes the light more diffused (more even)

Honey Comb - Something put over the light to control the direction of the light, this restricts the direction of the light

Fill Light - The lighting placed under the Beauty Dish which fills in the shadows

Back Light - This light separates the subject from the background, it's behind the model and it lights up parts such as the hair.
Colour Gel: A transparent coloured material that is used in filmography, photography or theatre for coloured lighting or for colour correction

Lighting Diagram:

This is a lighting diagram that my shoot group drew. it shows us how we put the lights when we set up the studio, the lighting diagram is a good reference point for what to do if we want to recreate the shoot. The two back lights had gels over them, they changed the lights colour which caused the effect that we can see in our photographs. We also used a fill light and a key light, these made the photograph look lighter. if we had just used the gel lights it would've been too dark because the gel lights, especially the dark blue gels, block a lot of light getting through.

High Key Lighting - Straight Images

Lighting Glossary

Key Light - The main light used to light the subject

Beauty Dish - A circular dish which is flexible - if it's white it is more diffusive, if it is silver it has more contrasted directional lighting.

Diffusion Sock - The cover placed on the Beauty Dish, it makes the light more diffused (more even)

Honey Comb - Something put over the light to control the direction of the light, this restricts the direction of the light

Fill Light - The lighting placed under the Beauty Dish which fills in the shadows

Back Light - This light separates the subject from the background, it's behind the model and it lights up parts such as the hair.

Lighting Diagram:

High Key lighting

High Key lighting is a lighting style for film, television or photography that aims to reduce lighting ratio present in the scene. This was originally done for technological reasons, since television and film didn't deal well with high contrast ratios, but now is used to suggest an upbeat mood.

High key photography is a modern lighting technique that is based on using mid-tone greys through to bright whites. The use of bright lights and lighting to eliminate shadow reduced the contrasts in the picture.

Camera Settings: If the light meter is set to F8, and we want to make it +2 exposure then you add two more f stops to it so it would be F10, if the background is overexposed then you can change it to a lower F stop. We need more light on the background than on the foreground.

Shoot Plans

Shoot One: For this shoot I intend to go to London with a few friends, I want to look at how my peers act naturally, as teenagers we are quite carefree, in contrast to how adults usually are, many adults are very serious and don't want to do silly poses for photographs which my friends naturally do, I think this shoot will work really well and if it does I would like to do the same thing with older people that are in their 40's to see how it contrasts. Already done

Shoot Two: I am going to Brighton on Holiday with my family, there will be people of a variety of ages, so I want to take a few photos there. A majority of these photographs will be location portraiture as Brighton is a very beautiful city and I don't get to visit much. Already done

Shoot Three: I would like to take photographs of younger children around my brothers age, which is ten. I think that I will explore doing slow sync or blur for this photo shoot as I think it will show young children as they are, which tends to be very fidgety, I believe that this photo shoot would look really good and I will get the chance to explore the technique a bit more. Rather than doing these photos in the studio, I think I will try doing them in the evening outside. Or if I do Blur I will do it outside during the day. 15th October

Shoot Four: For this shoot I would like to look at older people, probably in their 60's or 70's. I think this shoot will work really well with multiple exposure, I think it looks really good if I can keep the facial features on the subject, instead of entirely covering them in the other image. I will probably do this shoot in two parts, one when I go to kent to see my grandmother and another when my other grandparents come to visit me next. I would like to see how this shoot works as I think it might turn out really nice. Ongoing 

Shoot Five: In this shoot I will be taking photographs of people in the studio, I would like to do both boys and girls and when I've done this I may split it up into two shoots, or I may just do one. I would like to do this in the studio because I am able to control the lighting this way. I would like to do this shoot in the style of Thomas Ruff. 18th October

Shoot Six: I would like to take photographs of youth out in London, I may go to Brick Lane for this, I think it would be a good shoot to do near christmas. I don't know when I will do this.