Softboxes

Softboxes are probably the most popular light shaping tools because

1. They are controllable - unlike shoot through umbrellas, the light doesn't bounce around the room much
2. They can produce soft light - unlike reflective umbrellas, they can be placed very close to the subject when required
3. The softness or hardness of the light can be controlled easily, simply by moving them closer or further away, which changes their size relative to the subject
4. They are available in a range of different sizes and shapes
   

Louisa was sitting with a white wall 10' behind her.The wall was unlit. I leave the backgrounds unlit in this series so that you can see how much effect the light has on the background, and so that light reflected from the background doesn't interfere with the lighting on the subject. If backgrounds need to be lit they need to be lit separately, because they are separate subjects.

In this first shot, using the 60 x 60cm softbox with no other lighting, the wall is looking pretty dark because very little of the light from the softbox was reaching it because of the angle of the light, pointing downwards towards the floor.

The light was placed very close to the subject, in fact it was just 18" away from her in this shot, if it had been any closer it would have obstructed the camera and it can in fact be seen in the top right hand corner in the shot.

There is no 'right' distance or position for a softbox, but if you want the lighting to be soft then it needs to be close, because soft lighting is a product of a light that is large relative to the size of the subject.

Wraparound lighting
If you want 'wraparound' lighting then it needs to be both large and close, so that parts of the subject that are not directly facing the light still get lit by the large area of the softbox.

Using your softbox
Some people like to put a softbox each side of the subject. This is fine for area lighting, say of children who won't keep still, but it produces very flat lighting. In these shots, I've used just the one softbox as key light and I've placed it about 45^o to the right and 45^o above - a fairly typical softbox position.

Sometimes, a single softbox is all that's needed but some kind of fill is often needed to create more balanced lighting but without destroying all of the shadows that define the shape of the face.

So in this shot I added an on-axis fill, which is a fill light (in this case I used a large softbox) positioned just behind the camera.. A fill light in this position places light on all the parts of the subject seen by the camera.

I decided that the ideal fill ration here was 1 stop less than the key light. That's a subjective choice of course, and you can make the fill light as weak or powerful as you wish.

Because fill lights add to the overall amount of light reaching the subject, the shot needs to be re-metered. The exposure with just the keylight was f/11, now it's f/11 decimal 4, which is about f/13.

You can see that the fill light has lightened the shadows quite nicely without weakening them to the point where the effect has been lost.

And you can also see that some of the light from the fill has reached the background and lightened it. The reason for this is that the light from the fill is quite a long way from the model (7') and as it only has another 10' to travel before it reaches the wall, the inverse square law hasn't eaten up all of its power.

Of course, we don't always need to use a fill light at all, and in this first shot I've positioned the 5-in-1 reflector to kick a little light back into the shadow areas.

Reflectors are extremely useful (and cheap!) but when the key light is placed as close to the subject as it is in this shot, they aren't very effective because of the effect of the inverse square law, which means that the light from the reflector is travelling much further than the light from the key light.

So, if we want more fill then we have to move the reflector much closer, as in this shot.

But softboxes don't need to go in any particular place, so let's try a couple of variations...

One useful position for a softbox is high up, pointing downwards onto the face and directly in front of where the model is looking. The advantages of this position are that it produces a sculptured look to the face (as opposed to the fat, flat look of balanced lighting) and emphasises high cheekbones and minimises double chins, in the same way that a fresnel spot or a beauty dish, but in a much softer, less extreme way.

I could have added a fill light or a reflector, but decided that it wasn't needed for this shot.  Personally I quite like the shadows under the nose, lower lip and chin. If you want to experiment with this type of lighting, don't forget that the Lencarta softboxes allow you to remove either or both of the diffusers, to produce a crisper light when required.

Let's add a hairlight now.
I used a honeycomb fitted to a standard reflector (a snoot fitted with the supplied honeycomb would have done much the same job) and I placed it behind, above and to the side of the model to put just a splash of light onto her hair.

Because the hairlight is only producing a very localised light it doesn't affect the overall exposure.

What else can we do with a softbox?
A lot, as I said earlier, it's a very versatile tool.that can be used in a number of different ways. One interesting use is as a rimlight.

Here is our mannequin with our softbox immediately in front of her face and very slightly further back

Again, this was shot without any fill but a fill light or a reflector could be used to add fill if required.

Another type of lighting that softboxes do well is short lighting.

Short lighting is lighting the 'short' side of the face (or product) which means lighting the side that is less visible to the camera. The great benefit of short lighting is that it emphasises a small part of the visible subject (the short side) and leaves the larger part (the broad side) in shadow, which makes the face look thinner - not necessary with our mannequin but very useful for some subjects...

This shot is of course very extreme and although short lighting with no fill can work for some subjects it's usually better to add some fill, as in this example.

The opposite of short lighting is of course broad lighting, and again a softbox is the perfect tool for this.

All of these shots were taken with the Lencarta 60 x 60cm softbox, which is the smallest in our range - so when would you want to use a larger one?

Well, a small softbox is fine for shots of a single head & shoulder subject because it can be placed physically close, which makes it large in relation to the size of the subject - but a full length shot, or a shot of a family group would require the softbox to be much further away - and this would make it small in relative terms, which means that soft light wouldn't be available.

All of these shots are straight out of the camera, with no post processing work whatever except for re-sizing - but of course retouching, colour adjustments etc are very much part of the normal image production process and the glare from the plastic 'skin' would normally be retouched out before anyone saw them - and of course with a real live model with good makeup, they would not have appeared in the first place.

Here are two very different shots of real people, who don't have the problem of plastic skin. The first, by French fashion photographer Marc Gouguenheim, is a perfect example of a retouched and colour corrected shot. The softbox has produced soft, almost dreamy lighting  but because it has been positioned carefully to create both highlights and shadows, the lighting is interesting and far from flat.

The only light used here was a single, large softbox. The background, a cream wall, was unlit and the edges were darkened on computer.

And this very different example by Garry Edwards shows another example of rim lighting, this time using two softboxes, 1 each side of the model and pointing forwards as well as inwards.

Again, the background (a white wall in this shot) was unlit. No computer work was carried out on this shot.

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