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Prolific New York based photographer Daniel Norton has a few tips on how to play with dominant red color of the photograph and still make it pop nicely on the picture. With help of color gel, Daniel uses simple 2 light system, one of dramatic red environment – another for subject emphasis with the clean light.
Daniel shares: “A lot of times when you want to get a really super saturated paper background color, what you do is – you throw a gel on your lights. That is light in the background, so if I want a red background, and I want it exposed properly, but I also want high saturation, I’ll put a red gel on my light… that’s fun but I wanted to kind of mix it up with a little bit of style here today.
“I have actually in my Profoto 3 foot octa a red gel. “
“I’m going to take my controller, and I’m going to give it some juice. “
“Next I’m gonna throw a modeling light, and I’m gonna basically just light up her face… more or less… this is a five degree grid, so it’s pretty tight and it’s hard light cause it’s small… so you can see it’s throwing shadows, the light of her face…”
“So now I’m gonna turn on both lights. Now we can see we’re getting clean light on her face… where it falls in the shadow we’re getting red, but more importantly more interesting if you look at like her arms and such, they’ve got this cool red cast on her. “
” I’m shooting around f/8 guys, because I’m in a day light studio and I’m eliminating the lighting here… so check so we’ve have plenty of sharpness going down the dress… again if you were shooting a catalogue for this particular gown.. this is not probably the shot you want to do, but if you’re shooting more of an editorial shot… something with fun… you could do this. If you had let’s say different color dresses, you could you now use different gels, and different backgrounds for each one, because you’re gonna get a clean light on the face from this.”
“I backed it up as smidge, so I am just going to turn it up like 1/10th… I going to need a little more coverage to give her a little more space.”
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