2009-08-05

Strobist: producing Googly colored shadows



I stumbled across an article where I couldn't figure out how lighting was done in such a way that there were 3 different colored shadows casted on subject (see http://www.style.com/vogue/feature/2009/07/machine-dreams/ for the full article on Marissa Mayer below):


Then Thomas Kang told me "I believe it's subtracting colors, not adding them. You set up multiple color lights that add up to white, then when something gets in the way, it occludes only some of the lights but not the others, resulting in "shadow" areas where only those non-occluded lights shine, which no longer cancel out entirely, so they produce colors" Well duh! I knew that! :) I was curious to see how easy it was to duplicate the result, and took out my 3 flash and gelled them with different colors: yellow, blue, and red. Here are the results:

First, I make sure that ambient light isn't contributing to exposure (indoors, 200 ISO, f/4, 1/200 second):

Then, I set up the 3 strobes (yellow and blue on opposite sides). I took six different exposures taken at different times. By the way Buster is a very good super bear model and sits still very well.

Top left: yellow only. Top middle: red only. Top right: blue only.
Bottom left: no yellow. Bottom middle: no red. Bottom right: no blue

As you can see, bottom middle or blue+yellow make almost perfectly balanced colors (complementary). Adding a tint of red, and then manually doing white balance later yields the final result below with all 3 flash on:

That was pretty fun! By the way if you look at Marissa's picture, you'll see that there's at least yet another light (white) on the left side in order to make a harsh shadow to the right. Also the order of the color is different than the one I used. Now go out, gel your flash units and have fun!

2 comments:

grafica said...

Cool, so it worked. :) Cute test subject, too -- that's a pretty fun shot!

Anonymous said...

Rainbow shadows!!