![\"SamCraughwell](\"http:\/\/seanmcfoto.com\/randompanderings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/SamCraughwell_Makeup_180412_0743_web.jpg\")
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I recently put a photo of a makeup shot for my regular Makeup Artist, Samantha Craughwell, on my photography blog: Geisha<\/a>. While the lighting is straightforward, I thought I’d do a post on it. <\/p>\n For a lot of beauty shots, I favour Butterfly lighting. This is where the light is above the models head, and to the front. It casts a particular shadow under the nose, which is meant to look like a butterfly front on in flight. It’s more visible with harder light. My mate, Gary Hill, calls it ‘idiot lighting’ because anyone can get it right. In this instance I used the Elinchrom 70cm Deep Octa as key light, metered to f8, attached to a BX400. I choose f8 to allow the fabric background to blur. Had I want it in focus, I would’ve gone to at least f16. The light was mounted on an Elinchrom Polystand, a really versatile (albeit expensive) wheeled stand.<\/p>\n I added a silver reflector underneath to kick back light onto the fan, and for under the chin when the fan wasn’t being used. I choose it over white, as I needed more contrast in the shot. If you prefer a softer look, go with white. <\/p>\n Hair lights are a little out of vogue now, but for shots like these, I prefer to accent the hair, and the flowers. For this I used a 2nd BX400. This was on a Incline Arm stand, as reviewed<\/a> here already, with a grid and barn door set to give me exact control over positioning. Metered to f8 also. For blonde hair, I wouldn’t have it so bright. The final element in the lighting is a background light. For ease more than anything else, I used a bare Portaflash 336VM. I’ve 2 of these from my first ever kit, and still keep them for accent lights. Set to lowest power. I tend to used BG lights to taste, rather than meter strictly, unless I’m going for a high key look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lighting-2","category-makeup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBoth the stand and grid set are from Bessel<\/a>. <\/p>\n![\"SamCraughwell](\"http:\/\/seanmcfoto.com\/randompanderings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/SamCraughwell_Makeup_180412_0751_web.jpg\")
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