Feathering the light is one of these little secrets that many professional use in the studio to create amazing portrait. As you must know when using a soft-box the edge of modifier have the softest light compared to the centre that have a bright hotspot.
As light travel through the modifier, it becomes softer on the edge and this is the portion of light you want to use for portraiture . This it will create soft beautiful light with unique tones.
You can push this concept further by feathering the light, instead of pointing your modifier at the model you simply turn it away from the model so that the centre is facing the camera and only the edge of modifier are pointed at the model.
This can sound counter intuitive but it does really work the light from the edge is one of the most beautiful light i have ever worked with, skin tone becomes alive with natural contrast, beautiful texture, and colours.
A few thing to take into account using this technique, as a lot light will bounce back to your camera and lens it is best to have a lens hood to avoid any flare/haze.
Most of a light is directed away from the subject which means your model will receive less light. You will need more power than usual to illuminate your subject properly, maybe even have to upgrade to a more powerful flash/strobe ( a 400 watts strobe is enough for my shooting at f8/f11 ).
Feathering the light works with all modifier bit some specific designs have better result, the deeper your modifier the less efficient this technique is, i work with the Elinchrom rotalux 53 and the light output is just amazing.
Feathering the light also decrease the light reaching the backdrop and the fall off will be much more dramatic, consider using an additional light on the backdrop that can give a beautiful vignetting effect
As we are working with the edge of the modifier placement of light is critical for the best effect and to alleviate this problem it is better to work with the largest modifier you have
one last thing, because of their designs, beauty dish are really not optimise for the feathering technique it is simply best to avoid this technique with beauty dish.
You can find below a very comprehensive video by Felix Kunze, the master of this technique.
Comments