Beauty Lighting ...

I personally think these recent beauty images are some of my best studio work to date, and although great looking models, make up and styling played a large part in their creation, the lighting was fairly straight forward and some thing you could possibly get made or even make yourself !

So here is the set up :

I would only attempt the electrics if you know what you are doing, I got an electrician to make mine for me, which is basically 12 low energy (11W)  bulbs set in a circle around a hole through which you shoot.  It is the same principle as a ring flash but in my case much larger as I had the the bulbs mounted at a diameter of 65 cm  from the centre and therefore even larger than most beauty dishes, being closer in size to a medium sized soft box size. The bulbs have an equivalent output of 65 watts and obviously give out very little heat, allowing for the subject to be very close to them.

The background lighting is created from coloured gels using my studio flash modelling lights  on to a white wall.

As you can see from the catch lights in the eyes these make an amazing affect whilst giving ver even lighting to the subjects face. Images where shot at 100 -200 ISO with a wide aperture of  F1.2, 80 mm (Canon 5D 35 mm digital camera) or at F2.8 with a 80 mm lens (Hasselblad  H1 medium format camera with Phase One P20+ digital back)  I prefer the results from the medium format capture back but this was to perhaps be expected.

I would like to thank Tony Hazel Photography for first sharing his build of this type of lighting with me back in early November when I was scratching my head wondering how he was getting this type of catch light into his models eyes.

The original idea I had to use this lighting started with some Venetian  Masquerade masks, as I know these are usually quite difficult light in respect to the subjects eyes these worked very well :

 Expanding my ideas,as this is constant lighting; it allows the opportunity to mix other similar lighting that would be difficult to do with conventional studio flash, such as these rope lights :

Like ring flash the potential with bubbles also seemed something to explore and I can say it really works even better than I had expected the light really brings out the colours in the bubble solution:

The catch lights in the eyes also lends itself very well to mono images :

And finally although the catch light is really a plus with this lighting, the  eyes closed can work equally as well by creating some very magical lighting ....

So as you can see the potential for this lighting set up is vast and I look forward to more image creation with it in the future.

Marc;-)