Strobist Article and an interpretation

I wanted to share something with y'all that was posted in the Bibble "Show Off" forums:

http://support.bibblelabs.com/webboard/viewtopic.php?t=10532

One of our members was inspired by an article in the Strobist to experiment a bit and I thought how he used Peter Yang's technique as a starting point for his own concept was interesting. (There's a link to the Strobist in his post). It seems to me that while the lighting was 90% of the impact for both portraits, the post processing really changed the feeling of them. How much do you think about the post work when you're setting up your lighting?

-Colleen

The lighting is actually a bit different in the shot on the Bibble Labs forum.

Peter Yang, in his shot featured on Strobist is using classic butterfly lighting, but with a harder reflector (traditionally, the preferred light would be something like a large beauty dish, but Yang used a grid). Notice that Yang's light is right over the lens axis and right over the axis of the subject's nose.

In the Bibble forum shot, the light is high and angled down, but it's a little to the left of the subject, which makes the effect even somewhat more dramatic.

David A. Goldfarb said:

The lighting is actually a bit different in the shot on the Bibble Labs forum.

Click to expand...

That was really what made me want to share it - instead of trying to replicate Yang's technique, he used it as inspiration for his own expression. I see a lot of folks in different forums asking "how do I get the same look as (photographer, magazine, etc)?" and it makes me think about the balance between emulation to learn something and inspiration as a step toward creating your own style. While on one hand doing an exact replication of the lighting might have been a good learning exercise, I also think heading down a tangent inspired by the lighting might have been good creativity exercise. Students need to emulate to a certain extent just to learn the mechanics, but after a point they have to stop replicating and start creating.

I'm not a very "verbal" thinker so there's a whole bunch of stuff surrounding "emulation of" versus "inspired by" that probably needs to stew more before I can articulate it properly. I shared it more on impulse than having anything concrete to say about it

-Colleen