Part one can be found here

The clamshell setup, aka butterfly setup, is probably one of the simplest and most effective beauty setups, which has the advantage of being expandable into more complex setups. This easy setup does not require a lot of expensive gear and is probably the one setup that forms the basis for most of my beauty lighting setups.

It’s called a clamshell setup because it consists of a top light, either an umbrella (preferably a white bounce umbrella) or a beauty dish, positioned above the model head and pointing downward at about 45° towards their face and another light low down, pointing upwards at the models face at around 45° and 1-1.5 stops less power. This gives you a nice contrasty top lit effect from the key light which is toned down and controlled by the bottom light.

The real beauty of this setup is that if you only have once light, you can substitute a reflector for the bottom light but you will need to play with the angle a bit to get the effect you want.

DIY BOOM

The one problem with clamshell lighting is that you need to use a boom for the top light otherwise you end up with a light stand in front of your lens. Now we don’t all have booms lying around but it’s really easy to make one out of two light stands.

Disclaimer: Please be aware that this is only for use with small light flashes and should never be used with heavier studio lights and although I have used this trick myself on many occasions, by trying this you do so at your own risk and I cannot be held responsibility for any loss, damage or injury that may occur as a result of following these instructions.

What you will need:
1. 2 x Medium weight light stands
2. Cable ties
3. Gaffer tape
4. Sand bags

Now all you have to do is cable tie the leg from one stand to the upright from the other.

You need to make sure that the upright stand is weighed down with sand bags or weights and that the cable ties are strong enough and tight enough and if in doubt as to how many to use, err on the side of caution and use more.

It is also a good idea to wrap gaffer tape around the overlapping poles for extra strength.

You can adjust the height by raising the upright stand and you can adjust the angle by adjusting the legs of the stand that is acting as the boom.

So there we go one easy DIY boom.

Over the next few days I will post some easy ways to extend the basic clamshell setup.

I am going to use the street racer image as an example for this as it contains all the steps that I would normally follow.

Step 1 – Choose your background

The first step is to decide on a background image and whether you are going to shoot it yourself or use a stock image. In both cases you will need to have a pretty high resolution image but you will more than likely only need to print the section of it that will be behind the model unless you are using ambient Translighting which is a whole other blog  post.

In this case I chose to shoot my own image and I shot it in sections using a panoramic head and stitched the individual images using PTGUI so that I could increase the resolution of the final image. These are the individual images  and in this case please ignore the difference in exposure as they are part of an HDR set.

The stitched result looks like this.

Next I needed to turn this into a night scene so after quite a lot of Photoshop work, I had my final background image.

 The section of this image that would be behind the model was printed in two sections, each 90cm wide by 3m high,  on an HP Designjet Z3200 using HP Vivid Colour backlit media. The sections were then joined together and you can often get away with quite a rough join as the model more often than not covers most of the join.

The background lighting is then adjusted to give the desired exposure and then the model is placed in the scene and the lighting that will be used for her is adjusted accordingly.

Finally the image is taken into Photoshop and merged with original background image which restores the background to its full width. Ideally the background should be printed and shot in its entirety but that costs a lot of money and its easy enough to merge the images in Photoshop.

I get asked this question a lot lately especially by people following my Flickr stream where this term comes regularly. Basically Translights are large rear illuminated translucent prints that are used as background for shots and have been used for many years in the movie industry for shots with static backgrounds.

The idea is that where you have a static background, instead of using a green or blue screen, you use the image you are going to drop in so that you don’t have to deep etch and have minimal touch-up work and we all know what a pain trying to deep etch hair is don’t we.

A question that often pops up about now is, why not just use a normal print? With a normal paper print you have to light it from the front which is not always easy on every set but with a Translight you simply light it from behind and you get the added advantage that it projects colour onto your set much in the same way gels and a real life scene would which doesn’t work that well with front lit images.

Another question that comes up is where do you get Translights? Well you can either get a good print shop to print high res image onto a translucent backlit material for you or if you have your own large format inkjet just print it yourself.

I regularly print mine on my HP Designjet z3200, which produces mind blowing results, but I can only print 36”wide (max width of HP’s backlit material) so I have to join multiple prints together. This means I get a seam where the join is but it’s easy enough to remove later in Photoshop. From a commercial aspect, I find that the cost of the Translights is easily set off against the cost of the retouching time it saves, especially if there are multiple images that require deep etching.

These are some examples of my latest work shot with Translights.

I will post (in the next few days) a behind the scenes and how I did it for the above images from my Street Race series.

 Here you will find posts about my new work, exciting projects I am working on, lighting tips, tricks and setups, and other useful info pertaining to photography.

The blog is still new and over the next week I will be adding a lot of content so be sure to check back regularly.

Robert