Musicians by candlelight
My eight-year-old has been learning to play violin for a couple of weeks now, so it was time to make a portrait of him as a violinist. Both he and my daughter have also been playing piano for about a year, so I asked her to play the piano, so that we’d have a violin sonata setup. I wanted to create a low key mood, reminiscing of the old times when players would perform by candlelight.
The kids were not very cooperative, as my intentions were competing with Club Penguin (an online world) for my son and her story time (my job) for my girl. So I had to do this pretty quickly. Lighting is explained for each image below. It’s an experiment on light with no other purpose that just fun.
Image 1. A single SB800 flash with a 10 degree grid to my daughter’s right, to produce a very dramatic Rembrandt pattern on her face.
My daughter at the piano
Image 2. This is my favorite, as I am trying to create more planes of interest, and in this case I wanted the foreground to be out of focus, with the focal point in the background. I used two SB800 flashes, the one with the 10 degree grid on my daughter, as above, and a second one with a 20 degree grid behind her and pointing at my son.
Violin sonata
Image 3. The least dramatic image, I used the 20 degree grid in front of him and nothing else.
The violinist
Here is the lighting diagram for the image with the two musicians:
Lighting diagram
Category: Family