Studio Lighting workshop with Sophie Traynor
Overview
Sophie Traynor is a freelance commercial photographer who specialises in fashion, beauty, food and product. As her work comes under a lot of categories, Sophie explained that this could help employability within the industry. Due to having a various range of skills that could be linked together for various clients.
Product
Within the workshop that Sophie presented, she demonstrated how products could be lit with one light source and multiple different reflectors. Her technique involves using a high f/stop, such as f/18 – f/22, to have the whole product in focus, capturing the most intricate structures of the product. Pictured, is an image from the workshop that Sophie took, showing, how the difference in lighting positions can produce harsh and creative shadows. After the demonstration, we were able to recreate the images with our products, using the techniques that Sophie had shown, the Calvin Kline bottle was shot in the same session by me to show the variance of how the lighting and techniques can be used to an advantage.
Portrait
When demonstrating how she would light a portrait, the lighting setups are again simple, yet effective. She continues to explain that the lighting that she uses is predominantly beauty dishes, to smooth the skin out, prior to editing and octoboxes, so that the catch light in the eye is round rather than square. Sophie showed that control of the light on the face and the background should be done separately, to avoid gradient on the background.
Image Sophie produced in the work shop.
Image I then produced based of the skills that Sophie demonstrated.