Pretender 2

Hi All . Something a bit different in terms of my work . Low contrast to start from . I looked for calm lighting and less of my typical aggression in the shadows. May idea was to use less of a directional light which was fairly easy considering that the studio was large and all white - i decided to light all walls, floor and ceiling to create a similar effect to a light tent . The only difference is that it was of 1000 sq feet in size ! I did play around with the front light , just simply to fill in and of course had to keep an eye on the distance between the back wall and the mannequins to avoid light wrapping effect which was something i did not really wanted to see .
Practically i had 2 large lights at the back aiming at the back wall there was a small harder light at the front to fill in and there was a lower level light closer to the floor level just to add a hint of 3d effect to the image .
It took a bit too set up the power and distances . once completed we started to be creative with the placement of mannequins . Perhaps i should have started this by saying that we only had 2 and after each shot we were moving one of them to a new place and then shot again and move and shot and so on. We ended up with hundreds of images and then we used PS to marge the images . IN most cases there was now need to CUT OUT because it the camera was on a tripod and the lens was set to manual focusing . This helped to keep the post to the minimum .
During shooting ( we shoot tethered ) we liked some of the images but could see that we needed to get more artificial look on the mannequins , and we added some oil to get more reflection to the surface - if shoot with a directional light it would be hard to control , but it was all fine as out "light tent " kept the contrast fairly low .
Shot on :
Canon 5D mk3
Sigma Art 50
Bowens 750 Pro x 3 with large octaboxes at the back and small beauty dish as a fill
Bowens 500 as a low level light with a softbox