Lighting a shot is always a series of experiments. I have some very rough idea of what I want, and then I start playing around with placement and lighting. Sometimes sometimes everything looks great, and sometimes everything looks awful. I try to do more of whatever made the shot look great, but it’s a pretty rough art.
I liked how the shots I took in the dark, lit by a flashlight, turned out. So I decided to try that again for the next few shots – where Cosette wakes up and realizes that Rat is gone.
For these shots, I didn’t want shadow, like I did in Rat’s previous shots. I didn’t even want the shots to be particularly dark. But, I did need the background to be dark enough to mask the fact that I’m not actually shooting under the bed, and I wanted to capture some of the halo effect I saw in Rat’s pictures in the spotlight.
The first shot is right after Cosette wakes up.
In the middle of the night, Cosette hears a sound and wakes up
The original shot was hazy but, once I dehazed in Photoshop and decreased the exposure a bit on the background, I liked the slightly misty, dark look of the shot. The next shot is my favorite from the session.
Cosette and scrappy examine Rat’s empty nest
I love the halo around Cosette’s head. I left the main part of this picture as is, then selected and darkened the background to make it fade away.
I can’t really capture it, but the room is almost pitch black for these shots. The flashlight is not shining on the figure at all – I mostly have it pointing at the background just a bit above their heads.