Tutorial - Ethereal Lights

Tutorial - Ethereal Lights

What you will need:

• bubblewrap
• sunny window
• window ledge
• your choice of reflector
• white poster board
• tin foil on poster board
• photographer reflector
• tripod
• imaging program like Photoshop
• time and patience

I chose the window facing towards the afternoon sun in our rec room downstairs. This spot is right next to my dad's sewing machine. Yeah yeah, my dad can sew. Anyhow, it was perfect because it was in the corner and the sun was streaming thru. I just taped a strip of bubblewrap to the window. This will help diffuse the light but also, diffuse whatever is in the background of the window.

I propped Mina up on the window sill and pulled out my double-sided reflector. Now, you don't have to buy one but I already had it on hand since I do portraits of people outdoors sometimes. As you can see, I used a chair to help hold up the reflector but at the right angle to bounce the light back onto Mina.

Example #1: I used the gold metallic side of my reflector to give Mina a more warmer glow. The first pic is the unedited version. This is how the picture will look on your camera. Now, I had set my metering for partial because I wanted the exposure for the doll and not the background. This will help bring out more of Mina's features. My focusing is on her nose to keep the picture sharp. I set my ISO to 200 and basically, let the camera pick the shutter and aperture. ISO means the film speed. I set it to 200 because it was a brighter scene. Remember with film...ISO 100 - 400? Same rules apply with digital. You pick what's best suited for your situation.

On the edited version, I ran it thru Photoshop CS. I first used Shadow/Highlight to bring back some of the lighting to Mina's face. Then I used Curves, Selective Color (to adjust the color of the light bounced back at her), and levels. To remove the bubblewrap in the back, I simply used Eraser with a soft edge and voila! White background all soft! Editing took me less than 5 minutes.

Example #2: Here, I used the white reflector which casts a cooler tone, sometimes natural tone to the subject. I don't get as much bounced light as I would with the tin foil tho. I was too lazy to make a tin foil reflector but I might do that tomorrow and add to this tutorial if it's still sunny. So, I did something a little different here. Taking the picture was basically the same, it was post-processing where I did change the technique.

In Photoshop, this is to show you how upping the Levels and Curves can make part of your image fade, as you can see with her hair. I did do shadow/highlighting,...I just didn't use the eraser. I kept upping a combination of Curves/Levels to achieve a point where the bubblewrap disappeared in the background. Basically, "burned out". You don't need to know too much about Photoshop to use it, everything I've learned, I learned by playing with it or asking friends online. You can also do the same things with Photoshop Elements and even Paint Shop Pro. They might call the features a little different but you can almost achieve the same effect.

This is a basic technique for anyone wanting to do a white background. I don't use this technique at all because I've developed my own for white backgrounds. But, when I did start out taking pics of my dolls, this is what my friend, Jujube, recommended to me as it was what she used when she started taking pics of her many SDs! She now uses a different method also.

Dollicieux would like the thank JoAnn for sharing this tutorial. We appreciate the time it takes to put together such helpful instructions. Have fun using this great method to create beautiful pictures!