Clamshell and strips please!

As photographers we are always on the lookout for new ways to light our subjects and strip lights offer many possibilities for all types of social and commercial photography and in my next example I am revisiting an old technique, Clamshell lighting.

With this form of lighting one light is placed directly above the other with the lower angled up and the higher angled down toward the subject. I have read a few discussions on how this is achieved with some suggesting that a modifier placed above the subject pointing down and a reflector placed beneath for fill-in is clamshell lighting. In my opinion that is butterfly lighting with reflector for fill-in. A clamshell consists of two, almost identical parts, and in this case, I am using strip lights, two 90cm x 35cm Rotalux strips.

Two ELC 1000 ProHDs were used with the strip boxes positioned horizontally angled towards each other and about 1m from the subject.

I opted to shoot with a 135mm lens because I wanted a shallow depth of field so each head was set to the same low output to achieve f5.6 @ ISO 100. 

Both soft boxes had the inner and outer diffusers fitted and a quick measurement showed that these boxes at this distance showed only 2/10ths of a stop difference from the centre to the longest edge. They achieved a clean look with the familiar horizontal catchlight present.

A change of background, from a white paper roll to a black background, which is one of my polyboard flags, demonstrates how easy it is to produce quite a different feel to the overall image by choice of background colour.

Credits

Photography: Steve Howdle

Model : Keira Lavelle

Makeup Artist: Sarah Taylor