About this weeks episode:

In this episode Manni will discuss a five light setup. We recently entered a competition for Elinchrom. The prize was a portable light kit and even though we didn’t win the prize we still wanted to use the actual light setup for an episode. The image consists of three subjects, namely Manni and his two assistants, Jaco and Nicki. Each was shot individually and all the elements were brought together in Photoshop after the shoot.

On the finished result you see four strobes all with 82′ inch silver umbrellas. We didn’t use any diffusing material and we basically powered up the strobes to full power to get a rim light effect from top to bottom.

In the front we used two polyboards. The one on the left we had the white side angled towards the subject. This cause the heavy light spill from the umbrellas to bounce back onto the subject. For The polyboard on the right we had the black side turned toward the subject to darken the shadows a bit more.

To add a pop to every subject we used a single strobe with a beauty dish in the front. Each subject used a strobe or two as a prop. This was merely for the scene we were trying to create. Jaco and Nicki’s strobes were set to the lowest power to create a simple flare effect.

Here is the list of modifiers we used for the Five Light Setup:

• Four Silver Inline Umbrella – no diffusing material
• One Beauty Dish without grid
• Polyboards for light reflection and to increase shadows.