Caravaggio style chiaroscuro - lighting help

[abstraction]

I paint in oils with much more proficiency than my photography. I'm not very adept with a camera technically. I often use automatic settings even though I understand the basics - I find I'm not quick enough to figure out what I need for a given situation. But...

I'm wanting to organise a photoshoot with my four adult children around a table for a series of photos I can select from for a Caravaggio-style oil painting. Caravaggio means chiaroscuro and intense, rich colours. I am quite adept at weaving together an image from multiple photos seamlessly in photoshop (only have CS3) to use for painting. I gather I will need to take a bracketed range of images to play with for varied exposure. I haven't done bracketing but it seems straightforward.

(Here is an example of Caravaggio style that I have in mind. I'm not precisely reproducing this setup but it will be around a small table. This is part of a brilliant set of reproductions done by Diver & Aguilar.)

d421778f0c68fdd808e2dcb69b2619f1.jpg


My equipment. Very minimal:
Cannon 600d
Sigma 17-70mm 1:2.8-4 lens
Canon 50mm 1:1.8 lens
Lighting/flash - nothing. A desk lamp. I did a still life with this quite effectively but it's obviously inadequate.
I have a small tripod somewhere.

How do I achieve this with minimal equipment? I can't spend thousands on lights for this. I've come to you folk because many of you solve these problems creatively because this is where your expertise lies. But, to be my portrait I must take the image myself. I will obviously need to borrow or hire some equipment, and I would even pay for a photographer's time if they knew what they were doing to assist.

I'm sure I've chosen something rather difficult, but I do have a track record of pulling off overambitious things with almost no budget and starting out with inadequate knowledge and expertise. It's always a set of problems to solve. Knowing what these are is part of that. Finding the cheaper alternatives comes from talking to the right people.

[ameerat42]

Hi Brett. Long time no...

Well, "chairoscuro" to me means "light-dark", or (implicitly) contrasty, mostly achieved with
a single light source, the quality of which is to produce the main modelling illumination.

/End of "art" lesson

In the illustration (make sure you sufficiently credit all such if they are not produced by you)
it seems that the "light source" is placed somewhat just outside the group of subjects, a bit
above "head level".

Certainly, your desk lamp would struggle to provide the adequate illumination, probably
requiring long exposure times. Yes, a light on a stand would be the go. But I'll leave the
details to others here, as I do not do this type of photography and am just a half metre
in front of you for dearth of lighting equipment.

[abstraction]

Thanks. You have a long memory if you recall me(?)

Chiaroscuro was used by film noir and they sometimes used several layers of light and dark - such as soft light in sections of background to set off a foreground image and create depth. Many of the old paintings used this as well.

Because I have four children who will face in different directions I will need a counter light - ostensibly perhaps a candle or mobile phone - but to achieve it will really need a light I think. Maybe a mirror can do it, and keep costs down in process.

[swifty]

Hi abstraction,

What you’ve chosen can indeed be tricky but a subject I find most rewarding as it really teaches you about lighting.
Years ago (2009 I think) I took a photography course and one of our challenges was still life. Both the biggest challenge as well as the most educational aspect was that you had to be in charge of everything from the composition to the lighting to the technical settings.
Anyways to cut a long story short I copped out on the composition part and just copied a Cezanne painting but the lighting and technicals I had to learn and came up with this:



I’ve learnt to be quite proficient at dissecting technical elements of a photograph.

Now onto your example.
To reproduce something similar, we look at the light source and shadows from the image.
There’s a single light source from the upper left.
Light source is quite directional to create the harsher shadows and the position of the source light can be worked out just looking at the angle of the shadows on the table cloth.
There appears to be a dark cloth in the background which you can recreate or alternatively have a large enough separation between subject and background that it falls to black.

So you will likely need some form of off camera flash equipment and the ability to trigger it from your camera. Using continuous light sources such as a desk lamp may limit your camera settings without the ability to change lighting power. More on this later.
It needn’t be expensive eg. Godox sells some very good triggers and cost effective flashes.
You’ll likely need a snoot or something to focus the direction of the lighting. Softboxes increases the size of the light source which softens the light but still keeps it relatively directional but you can improve this with grids.
Moving the large light source further away decreases the relative size and will make the light harder. Moving it closer with make the relative size larger which softens the light. So you need to experiment with distance and maybe size if you have access to more modifiers.
Altering distance also changes how bright your subjects are as each person’s relative distance to the light source changes. Remember the inverse square law for light intensity away from the light source. That’s why it’s important and useful to be able to vary your flash power.

In terms of camera settings, the DOF should dictate your settings based on your composition.
Keep your ISO at base and shutter speed within the max sync speed. Base ISO is important to get the most optimal capture exposure which ensures the best SNR which translates to good colour saturation and minimal noise. Without the ability to vary your flash power, you’ll likely need to compromise exposure settings eg. raising your ISO or opening up your aperture.
You’ll want to ideally eliminate ambient lighting so you may be forced to up your shutter speed but if you go beyond your flash sync speed you significantly lower your flash output.

Work with a single light source first. Then try and position reflectors or other surfaces (eg. A white board) located off camera outside the scene you’re photographing so you can get enough fill on subjects not facing the light source.

You’ll likely only need to invest in a trigger and flash and make do with DIY modifiers to begin with.

Try it on a test scene before the actual shoot and post the results here so we can help.
Good luck

[farmmax]

I'm definitely not a portrait person, and prefer taking photos with natural light. We did do a portrait session at camera club using just a hand held light stick. One person just held the light stick (totally adjustable light levels and adjustable rgb range) at various angles around our models, in a dark room and we got great results similar to what you want.

There are people on here experienced in portrait taking, so hopefully they can make some good suggestions.

If you are good in photoshop,have you thought of taking a reasonably evenly lit photo of the scene you want and then manipulating the lighting in photoshop? Then you can play with how you would like the lighting before committing to paint. I would use a raw image file, because it has more information in it.

Manipulating light in photoshop is pretty easy. As an artist you probably can do it well, because you know where light should fall. Just put two new layers above the original image in photoshop. Turn the blending mode of each layer to Overlay. Name one layer "Light" and the other "Dark" so you don't get them confused. Set your brush to soft, and a low opacity. Try starting about 10%. Paint with white on the "Light" layer in areas you want to lighten, and "black" on the Dark layer with areas you want to darken. If you make mistakes, just erase the paint on the layer.

Some tutorials suggest filling the overlay layers with mid grey first. They will become transparent when you change the blending mode to Overlay, but I've never bothered doing that because the results don't seem to be any different.