Portrait setup.. Help!

Looking for some critique on the lighting of this.. all of these are straight from the camera (converted from raw to jpeg) with minimal cropping on one.


A good friend of mine is an author and needs a portrait for his dust jackets/ bio so I gladly volunteered. Now.. I just picked up a few lighting things.. and have NEVER done any type of portraits like this. Candid pictures of my daughters with available light is as far as it really has gone for me.





Equipment


Camera: Cannon EOS 7D


Lens: 100mm f/2.8<span style="color: #ff0000;"]L IS USM Macro


Lighting: Canon Speedlite 430 EX II; Lumiquest Softbox III;Studio Systems 32" 5-in-1 reflector with stand





He was insistent on having his books in the background so that made things a little difficult.. His bookshelves are in a 7' x 9' room with 8' ceilings. I wanted a little blur on the books so he was 3-4 feet from the shelves.. putting my back into the wall to get him in the frame.





Here was a test shot without anything set up, with the ceiling light on.


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AWB, f/2.8; ISO-200; 1/30 sec, 100mm.. of course.


Obviously this was completely unacceptable. Now.. not really knowing too much about what I'm doing (still) I figured I'd experiment and implement different lighting.. trying one thing at a time.


The first thing I tried was adding my speedlite with the softbox on it. I set it up on my tripod, to the right of the camera.. with the tripod raised up so that the flash was pointing toward him at about a 45 degree angle.. Really the flash was only about 4-5 feet away from him.. the entire distance his small room would allow. Overhead light was still on and my camera meter settings showed my exposure as being two stops underexposed.


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f/2.8; ISO- 400; 1/25 sec -- 100mm


Some things started screaming at me right after reviewing this picture. The nasty glare on the glasses, also the annoying shadow on his face because of the glasses. the shadows on his neck because of his collar as well. I realized that with the flash and overhead light, the AWB was just not going to cut it either...


So I took this picture for CWB:


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The glare was becoming more and more of an issue for me.. I took off the softbox and pointed it straight up to bounce on the ceiling. I also wanted a little more light on the left side of his face (ear, hair, neck) so I set up the reflector to the left of the frame. I also turned off the overhead light.. which made things instantly less complicated. (although a bit hard to compose because it was dark.)


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CWB; f/2.8; ISO- 200; 1/25 sec.; 100mm


Much better. Shadows are less distracting and overall it's a more appealing photograph... it's also boring. Knowing that I already had at least one he would be happy with, I started trying a few more things with the lighting. I decided to bounce the flash off of the wall to the right. At first this wasn't what we were looking for at all.. the left side of him disappeared into darkness.. I thought it was kind of cool, but not what he had in mind. So again, I brought up the reflector to the left, a little further away this time to allow some shadows, which also made for a more interesting background.


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f/5.6; ISO-400; 1/100sec; 100mm.





This was the best I was able to come up with. Personally I like the last one.. He did not. He had washed his hair that day (a weekly ritual.. ha. Oh the life of an author) and was unhappy with how fluffy it was. Personally I thought it brought an Einstein/Neil Gaiman like quality to it. This is the configuration I'm going to start with tonight. Just curious if any of you brilliant portrait photographers out there have and advice or feedback for me before I head back over there.





Much appreciated!


-Rocco

The last two are certainly an improvement on the first couple.


Personally I prefer the third photo. The transition from lights to shadows is more gradual and the shadows a little less harsh. The light reflecting off the rim of the glasses is also good. Seperation from the background is nice, you can still work out that he's in some sort of library but the focus is on him as the subject so it's applicable to the context.


I'd probably try to increase the exposure slightly and tell him to brush his hair or something![:D]


Other than that, one thing to look out for is to make sure the glasses frames don't obstruct his eyes like it does in the last photo, I find it a little distracting.


You could also lower the temperature ever so slightly, it's a little warm for my taste but that's getting a bit nit-picky.


Good luck with the shoot anyhow, I think you've done a pretty good job overall.


Ben.

I agree with Ben on everything he said. For your next attempt, you may want to try a very slight rim lighting (not overpowering, just enough to separate his hair from the bookshelf). Also, use a slightly cooler Kelvin balance (as Ben said). A CTS (or CTO) gel will help balance your flash with the ambient (assuming you dropped your shutter speed to 1/25 second to allow for ambient to expose the background). Otherwise, more flashes will allow you to kill the ambient and shoot at 1/250 second (I

Wow! Just pulled this up at work.. and again it

I

Well.. Made another attempt. Focusing seems a lot better, and his hair.. well.. it's as good as it gets coming from him.





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Was still having a HORRIBLE time with glare on his glasses.





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Better, I think, but still room for improvement. Any thoughts? Also, any tips as far as light direction to avoid glare would be appreciated. :)

A simple solution for getting rid of glare in glasses: have your subject face away from the light source! In this instance you