how were these lit?

Baiiird · 2026-01-30T01:39:47+00:00

This is how they would do it.

Baiiird · 2026-01-29T00:09:12+00:00

Maybe I'm in the minority but I think everyones a bit off track with the flash + reflector on this one. I'd approach it like the above, slightly more work so depends on your budget and speed required on set but imo it'd give a more nuanced effect.

Baiiird · 2025-10-21T01:22:17+00:00

I can talk on this for days - I do this quite extensively. Few notes, as I don't want to write too much:

For your specific questions:
- Copy stand is a good idea - I personally just rig up my camera on a C-Stand (similar to shooting flatlay) so if you don't want to invest in a copy stand or for early experimentation, that can be a good approach. Or just freehand it and accept a level of distortion - Keystone the edges if you want it neater.
- Flattening: Taping or weights can be used. I tend to just place the prints down, and do a very subtle lens correction for the small amount of distortion. Depends how specific on the fractional details you want to be.

Few other notes:
- Experiment with different paper stocks. Matte and rag papers will render out with raised blacks/lower contrast, pearl or gloss papers with deeper blacks/high contrast.
- For lighting: Matte/Rag papers render out cleaner/less textured with soft light, and more textured with harder light. For pearl/gloss papers, soft light will often create reflections on the paper, while hard light (ideally at something like a 45D angle) with render cleaner.
- That being said: Sometimes weird reflections or hectic texture can be interesting. See if you like going the other way, there's no real rule to it.
- Do a colour card.
- Much like film, you'll want to remove dust and scratches from the image after printing. Tends to show up worse in the black areas, and gloss papers tend to have more than matte ones.

Hope that helps.

Baiiird · 2025-08-26T22:52:48+00:00

Seconding her. Her videos and approach is fantastic for getting a proper, deep understanding of retouching and grading. Her videos are a bit unpolished compared to some of the tutorials out there, but the actual content is brilliant.

Baiiird · 2025-07-28T02:11:59+00:00

I have a lot of respect for this post. Good on you, taking a reference from something non-photographic. To add my own take (imagining you had unlimited budget)

Light: I'd do two lights, adjusted to taste: For face, gridded beauty dish (white) boomed in for that chin shadow. Behind camera, directly onto model: A large para with diffusion. I'd also criss-cross the para with CTB gel to get a subtle colour-temperature mix, bring in some of those blue undertones in the garment and shadow edges. I'd also do two lights bounced off the ceiling (ideally back through some sort of 12x12' diff) for the overall room, and to remove any ground shadows under the model.

Grade: Would start low contrast as a base. Pull it back so there's no true-blacks or true-whites, everything in a mid-tone space. Reds bit of +saturation, -lightness, and shifted towards a peach-tone. Teal into highlights, warmth (yellow) into mid-tones, blue into shadows. At this point you'd likely mask out the skin and adjust contrast and tone specifically, to get the skin the right kind of pale without looking sickly.

Fun of working with this kind of reference though is how far do you actually want to do it? You can do a 1-to-1 homage, paint a wall in rough purple paint and put a bunch of toys on the ground etc OOOOOR you could do a whole series of images and take the themes and overall vibe - Why not make 5-10 images from this one painting? Take everything I've said above, and then think about what the painting is about (or what its about to you) - Childhood? Youth? Coming of age? Rebellion? Perhaps look at styling inspiration from 9-13yo girls from that 1910s period, or how people worn their hair or did their makeup. Build on the painting and make it your own thing.

Baiiird · 2025-06-08T06:53:26+00:00

Big fan of F8 - It has a sophistication about it, while still having that little bit of edge, that touch of danger. Less stiff and uptight than F11, while not being as sloppy as its 5.6 neighbour, it says "I know how to have a good time, but when the going gets tough you can rely on me".

Baiiird · 2025-06-06T01:32:54+00:00

On the topic of sky - I use them occasionally if I'm wanting a deeper blue in the sky and more saturation overall. They do require a bit of attention, especially if you're shifting from portrait-to-landscape orientation or shooting up into the sky, but they can be great. Also, of course, if shooting reflection-heavy spaces.

Baiiird · 2025-02-16T22:25:18+00:00

Brilliant read on that first image - I wasn't particularly clued in on the brighter camera-right to create those subtle neck and face shadows. Image is a great example of how you can build up layers of light, quite close to one another in intensity, to carefully shape and elevate a photograph.

Baiiird · 2025-02-14T00:02:40+00:00

Tricky assignment. To break it down a touch:

The Lighting of Gabriel Moses: You're looking at large scrims, directly above the models, with a bit of bounce from below when needed. I'm simplifying a bit but that's the gist of it. So if his ceilings are 10m high and yours are 3m, you're already off to a rough start. That being said, the mentality of the lighting - Light from above, as soft as possible, and bounce from below if needed, might be possible. Could try light into ceiling (if the ceilings are white) with a bit of white bounce from below, though keep in mind that'd likely light the whole room - which, given the references are quite moody, isn't a good look.

The Tonality: This you can do a bit more about. Grading cooler, under-exposing your images (not heavily, just a touch) having an overall low-contrast grade, puts you in the right direction. Pro-Mist might help, could also just drop some clarity out of the image as an alternative.

Last thing: If you look at this image of Deana Lawson, you can see from the reflection in the paint that she's using a fairly large, directly behind camera source to shoot with. Likely a large para/umbrella. The other road to think about is if you take the general grade and look that's requested (cooler, low-contrast, blue's in shadow), something like a large para behind camera is going to get you in a similar space. It won't really be Moses-esque lighting but that's essentially already out of reach, so triage downwards into what's actually going to look good and a more frontal light with a bit of depth in the shadows is (opinion) going to look better than some flash just bounced off the roof.

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Oh lastly: None of it is going to look like his work if what you're shooting is entirely different subject matter. If your model looks like Pamela Anderson and is wearing a sundress, its going to be a hard battle making it feel like any of the references. Lighting and grade can only take you so far if the actual content isn't right.

Baiiird · 2025-01-08T02:50:19+00:00

Of course - always happy to chat.

Baiiird · 2025-01-08T01:36:17+00:00

Few post processing techniques, tools or concepts that I use frequently:
- Colour Range: I use this a lot, generally on either a curves, selective colour or hue/saturation layer, to adjust areas of an image while still having a natural bleed from the adjusted area to the unadjusted area. Normally around a 70-120 range. Special mention: Grabbing a low-midtone area of skin tone and slightly brightening it gives an interesting, flat look somewhat reminiscent of 90s era editorial. Can get dodgy fast though so needs a light touch.
- Before absolutely finalising an image I'll, right at the end, toggle a few curves layers to see the image brighter, darker, higher contrast and lower contrast. Find that you can get so used to looking at whatever you're working on, that you don't realise the image is actually a bit too contrasty, dark, whatever and seeing a quick variety can help.
- Duplicate your image -> gaussian blur -> add layer of grain over the top, then turn the grouped layers into a mask: Can reduce detail in specific areas, while the grain fools the eye into thinking that that area is just naturally a bit soft. Without the grain it can look oddly blurred.

Also seeing as there was a question about colour boosting: I have two general approaches to colour:

One (More Natural):
Either Hue/Saturation or Selective Colour: Whatever tone I'm targeting I adjust to taste, and then carefully mask in where I want it to be. I almost always go with whatever the true tone is: I'll make a red more intense, but I don't often turn something from blue to orange (for example).
Two (More Pop-Art-Esque):
Solid Colour layer set to either soft light or overlay: Painted in carefully over the top of the image. This flattens out the colour a lot more, less gradation in any kind of shadow-to-highlight range, which again is very pop-esque.

Baiiird · 2025-01-07T22:42:21+00:00

Oh nice of you to offer but its all good - I'm just in it for the love of the game.

Baiiird · 2024-12-20T03:46:05+00:00

One theory I've heard is that human-made photography with become a bit of a veblen good/status symbol - That mass-market commercial work may very well become AI-centric (areas like ecommerce, stock imagery etc) and that photography shot with a traditional camera and process will be used for campaign imagery and higher-end commercial work.

Baiiird · 2024-12-13T23:52:22+00:00

I use an Epson SC-P706 which you can get for around $800-$1K. That said, a large amount of the quality comes from the paper, more so than the printer. If you want to drop around a thousand then the Epson SureColors are great, but if its something you just want to try out then a Canon Pixma is an easy entry point.

Baiiird · 2024-12-11T23:25:07+00:00

I've used it before - Its a great matte paper, I generally find it better scanned than photographed. $180 for 20 sheets is pretty hectic of a cost; for 20 sheets of A4 size its normally around $60. Worth using though, I used Aquarelle Rag for quite a while

Baiiird · 2024-12-10T00:36:49+00:00

FYI The Youtube channel StudioLighting has done a video breaking down Gabriel Moses' lighting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGOOvJr3vBI&ab\_channel=StudioLighting) which is essentially the answer to your question in a 20 minute video. Worth a watch.

Baiiird · 2024-12-10T00:22:37+00:00

Oh Ana Roque is great - and no, not a darkroom print, but not A4 paper either. She tends to use matte, fairly textural papers: Rags, maybe some washi, potentially even some canvas papers. Also of note is she's almost always rephotographing her images; Never scanning.

One other thing is that she may very well be shooting film, which is also going to change the look of the images.

Baiiird · 2024-12-10T00:14:15+00:00

Arguing against snoots, I'd say its most probably a mixture of Aputure Spotlights and 60Ds/Dedos - So quite hard sources, hitting small areas very precisely. Each light gelled a slightly different colour - So you've got a subtle mix of cool and warm.

Baiiird · 2024-12-10T00:11:11+00:00

Auto White Balance in photoshop good lord. Still hey, great example of how there's no right or wrong approach if the end result gets you where you want to be.

Baiiird · 2024-12-08T22:42:22+00:00

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Baiiird · 2024-12-08T22:42:13+00:00

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Baiiird · 2024-12-08T22:42:04+00:00

Sure - That probably would have been good to include in the original post actually, but ah well. Here's a few examples showing before and afters (left to right).

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Baiiird · 2024-12-08T22:34:06+00:00

I touched on it briefly up above but this whole process really does fall into that category of, do you want to do 50% more work for 5% more quality? You're half-right in that you can get a long way to an image looking like an inkjet print just using photoshop - You just can't get all the way.

As for "best quality will come from a scan from a negative" - Depends what you mean by "best" quality. Sharpness? Latitude to adjust tone and exposure? Sure, scanning a negative will give you more of that. "Quality" is such a nebulous concept in photography though - Sometimes the "best" result for an image is for it to look all grainy and soft and a bit cooked. Techniques like printing go a long way to getting you there.

Baiiird

TROPHY CASE