Third portrait attempt

Ok, I picked up PSCS, a 32i 5in1 reflector and a couple more lights. I'm mostly looking for comments on the lighting as I couldn't get rid of all the shadows even with the reflector, and the background is quite noisy, but overall C&C is welcome.

50mm/1.8
f4.0
1/60
ISO 800

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I'm not clear on what you mean by the background being noisy - I don't see any evidence of noise, anywhere.

The only place where there is an unfortunate shadow is under her chin where the two shadows overlap.

The hot spot on her forehead is more troublesome, in my opinion, than the shadows.

In any case, the problems with the shadows on her face can be resolved in two ways. The lighting should be more diffuse. Naked flash units are just too harsh. The other thought is to use the shadows to control the modeling (3-dimensionality) of the facial structures. I suggest one way of accomplishing that using the classic Rembrandt lighting as described in my tutorial below:
http://www.zaffora.com​/W9DMK/PortraitLightin​g.htm

or the downloadable PDF file at:
http://www.zaffora.com​/W9DMK/PortraitLightin​g.pdf

I think Robert hit the lighting on the nose. For the "noisy" background, what kind of background is it? What did you use? It looks like velvet, or something like that. I believe the noise you are seeing is simply just the material. I could be wrong, but it is just a guess.

Robert thanks for the great tutorial, that explains alot. To clear the noise up first, you are correct, I don't see it in this resizing. Perhaps lost in the jpeg conversion? It was green and blue flecks like in dark shadow areas on a vhs movie. The backdrop is a satin like material.

I guess I'll explain my lighting so as give a better idea of what I could improve.

The frontal lights are 50w floods at about an eight foot height, the backdrop light is 50w halogen at ground level and the hair light is a 50w halogen at eye level. Santa is bringing me two adjustable 7' light stands with metal reflectors for the front lighting so I'll be able to follow your tutorial more closely.

Unfortunately with all the photography and video equipment I've recently bought I have to make do with rigging up anything I can find around the house. My total investment in light so far is about $37 dollars! LOL

*EDIT* Oh yeah no flash was used.

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Excellent layout drawing. I use Microsoft's PhotoDraw v2, which is not bad, but I'm looking for something better. What do you use?

For purposes of discussion, I will not comment on hairlight or backdrop lights, because I consider those aspects of the overall scene lighting to be independent of the lighting that I discuss in my tutorial. The lights that you have may need diffusion, and I don't know how to tell you how to do that with your lamps, but that will probably be your biggest headache. Positioning the lights for my method is very straight forward. One of your two main lights would come around close to the camera as the flat lighting and will probably have to be toned way down to keep it in the needed range. The other light should be swung around further to the side and raised to a higher elevation to act as the modeling light. For a standing pose, that presents obvious problems. The primary effect of the modeling light is to be the primary light of the face and that light should come from a position such that if the model faces directly into the camera but moves her eyes (only her eyes) as far to the left and up as she can see, then she should be just able to see that light (eyes back to the front when she's done with that - Hi!). That means the light from that lamp makes a short shadow of her nose below and to one side of the nose. The other signal you are looking for is a triangle of light (pointing down) on the cheekbone opposite from that light. If you start from there and then just add in enough flat light from the other lamp to soften those shadows until they almost disappear, you've got it.

The thing that most people don't realize is that you DO need shadows - otherwise the facial contours do not show up to give depth and 3-dimensionality to the face. The tuning of the light strengths is critical to get those shadows to be just enough but not too much.

One last point - 6 ft camera distance may not be far enough. A little longer lens and greater distance is normal for portraits (8 - 9 ft.).

My tutorial goes through all that, step-by-step, but you can cut to the chase.

Apart from what others have mentioned I think the choice of colour for the background is wrong. Too similat to hair and cardigan. But perhaps you deliberately choose it that way.

The colors are in harmony, but the background color is so close to her sweater color that you don't get the separation that you want.

Robert absolutely fantastic reply. That makes it so clear as to how to handle such a setup. I think even better than your tutorial. I now know exactly what I need to do. I even noticed Santa has brought my xmas present home last night and hid it in the basement. Trouble now is waiting until the 25th! LOL

Overbeyond thanks for the comments. I have three backdrops. This one, a dark charcoal velvet and a blue / white combo like they use for school portraits. This is the background that was handy when I asked the wife to model so I could test out my lighting additions. I will post new pictures with my new setup on boxing day!

P.S. Robert, my layout drawing was just thrown together in PowerPoint and then copied and pasted into Paint to save as a jpeg.

I'll leave all the technical lighting stuff to the pros, but can I just say that I actually like the red background. It looks a little 'devilish'!

Graham

That's weird! I have made innumerable slide shows with Power Point but never thought about using it for making original artwork - didn't even notice any tools for that purpose. Obviously, I need to try that out, because I like the way your graphics look.

Thanks for the tip!

Glad I could return even that modest favour to you! LOL
Look under auto shapes in the bottom left corner.