Studio lighting example for pet portraits
Rosa who I have photographed before as model, also lives out her love for cats as a catsitter. (Check out her Instagram page). She brought her cat, Happy, in to the studio for a few portraits … but Happy had definite opinions about that! My career as a photographer of cats seems to be off to a somewhat shaky start! He was just being a typical cat – adorable, but with a mind of his own.
In setting up the lights, one of my main considerations, just like it would be when shooting on location, is to make sure I have a background that complements the intended photo. So in this case, I also started with the background splash of light. I took some time to get it at just the right angle, at the right height, with a color that I like. (I gelled the flash for that orange color.)
Lighting details:
I used (3x) Profoto A2 flash (B&H / Amazon) for this photo session. Even though I have a number of larger studio flashes, I wanted to see for myself if I could do a really nice portrait lighting setup with these remarkably portable flashes.
There’s a Profoto 2ft Clic Octabox (B&H / Amazon) on camera-left as main light; and a Profoto 2ft Clic Octabox (B&H / Amazon) as rim light on camera right. The splash of light on the grey wall in the back, is from the third A2 flash with a gel, angled towards the wall via a boom-arm. I lifted the exposure in the RAW file for that spot so that you can more clearly see that flash.
Camera settings and camera gear used for this sequence of photos
- 1/200 @ f/8 @ 200 ISO
- Profoto A2 flash (B&H / Amazon)
- Profoto 2ft Clic Octabox (B&H / Amazon)
- Profoto 2.7 ft Clic Octabox (B&H / Amazon)
- Clic Creative Gel kit (B&H / Amazon)
Summary
The Clic system and the flashes are a nice, thorough and portable system, which will see a lot of use.
I don’t know how you get the cat to look at you, I can’t get mine to look at me at all!
Happy the cat had met me before, and it was just the three of us in the studio … and I just had to be patient and ready for when he looked at the camera. But yes, cats are famous for purposely ignoring you.