Photographer, Bristol UK

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Blog posts by Craig Pitts Photography

Studio Test Shoot with Artur

On Sunday I welcomed Artur into the studio to do a super quick test shoot after he dropped me a message on Instagram earlier in the week.

We only had about an hour or so to shoot so I kept things very simple and ran through some basic one and two light setups with the goal of ending up with some high and low key portraits.

I shot with the Canon 5Ds and the Sigma 85mm f1.4 ART lens mounted on a tripod. I don't usually shoot on a tripod but as we were only doing headshots I decided to use the tripod to make life a little easier for myself.

For the first set of low key portraits my key light was one Elinchrom D-Lite RX2 modified with a small softbox. I also used another RX2 to put a bit of separation light on the black background.

Below are 3 of my favourites from the first set:

For the second set of high key portraits, I took the background light and attached a large octabox and backlit Artur to create a clean white background that also acted as a separation light due to the wrap around effect. I continued to use the small softbox to act as a fill light on Artur.

Below are 3 of my favourites from the second set:

For an hour long shoot I was really happy with the results, however, it wasn't until I got home that I realised that I'd shot the entire shoot in jpeg, a mistake that I've never made before and will definitely learn from.

Luckily the 5Ds produces incredibly detailed images and so I had more than enough resolution to work with in post, though I wasn't able to edit any colour images due to the fact I normally shoot in Monochrome so that I don't get distracted by colour when setting my lights! 

Cheers to Artur for making the trip down to the studio, you can check out more of his work on his Instagram - @artur_mizerski_jr

-Craig