My photographic preference is in soft shadows with strong contrast maintaining detail across the exposure. I use this preference to model faces into three classic forms; the Rembrandt, the split, and the glamour.
The Rembrandt is characterized by the triangle of light on the shadow side of the face created by the shadow from the nose and the shadow falloff of the cheek bone. This one of Matt is dramatic, with a high shadow to highlight detail. Were the key lamp any farther camera right, this would end up in a split.
Like this. I had Ben turn his head just enough to gather the catchlight in his left eye. His cheek is barely revealing some ambient light, not quite enough to qualify as a Rembrandt. The split is characterized by dividing or splitting the face with the key at a ninety degree angle to the face.
Look at Whitney's eyes and you'll see the glamour set-up in the catch lights. The key lamp is diffused and above her and the fill is a bounce fill from below. A subtle short loop shadow is formed just below her nose and the falloff of shadow on her cheek bones compliments her extraordinary facial structure.
These styles are easy to come by with studio fixtures and a digital SLR, but this class is geared toward reaching similar results with less inventory, using existing light and perhaps the most accessible camera to most of us, the camera phone.
This is Courtney. She was gracious enough to model for our class lab.
It was a little after 11:00a, the sky was clear, the sun high, not the best conditions to be shooting portraiture, especially with an iPhone.
She was in the shade in this shot which gives her an even exposure across her face, but in order to get a good exposure, the background washes out to over exposure. Nothing critical, just one of those photographic tradeoffs. To add a little kick in modeling Courtney's face, we added bounced sunlight from a flex fill.
This created a Rembrandt shadow on her right cheek, defining or modeling her face a bit better. But the image is still problematic in that the iPhone's 35mm-equivalent wide angle lens distorts Courtney's face, aggrandizing her forehead and nose.
We then created a glamour look, modeling her face again using existing sun light. With her back to the high sun which framed her head and shoulders in a halo, a flex fill was used as a main above her, reflecting sunlight to her face from above. A second bounce device was used to fill from below creating, I'm guessing here, a 1.5:1 ratio of key to fill.
These ratios are determined be the distance of the flex fill to the subject, or by varying the flex fill's luminance by using its alternate softer side to reflect light.
Pulled into proper distances, the key bounce and the fill bounce produce light in range (about four stops) of the backlight. And by zooming the focal length by 1.5X, we got a bit away from distorting Courtney's features.
I've dropped the chroma here and added a depth of field effect with the Camera+ app on my iPhone, but the image still isn't right. I need to compress the focal length a bit more by going 2X.
