Kimonoff

lighting scheme I

Kimonoff is a new brand of kimonos “from home”. The idea is to replace the classic bathrobe with a more elegant, casual and kimono-inspired style. As this is not a garment to go out of the house, the idea was to do the session in a house. I wanted to contrast the elegance and colorfulness of the fabrics with the antique atmosphere of a classic building in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona.

For the first full-length photographs I decided to set up a set of lights on the stair landing. For this set I mounted a single light source as I wanted to emulate the actual window light that was in the stairwell space.

Given the start time of the shoot, there was no direct natural light reaching the staircase so I used a Godox Witstro 360 flash. This flash, despite being very small, has great power and the possibility of using it with battery, which greatly facilitated the mounting on the ladder, not having to look for sockets where to connect the flash. I really like this flash as the flash lamp is outside the flash housing which is very good when we want to use a soft light fixture as the light is evenly distributed inside the softbox.

Godox Witstro 360

I used a parabolic fixture in order to get a soft but very focused light on the model’s face. The parabola has the property of bouncing the incidence of light in a parallel way. It is not as directional as a Fresnel lens accessory (which I have already mentioned in a previous post) but this is exactly the feature I needed for this session.

The Godox PL90 parabola meets these requirements very well and is very easy and quick to assemble, has a very good finish and takes up very little space when folded.

Godox P90L

The second set was set up in a room with a double door opening onto a bright, enclosed balcony with plants. I used the translucent white curtain of the room as a background and let the branches of the plant on the balcony show through. As the natural light was not strong enough, I placed a second flash on the balcony illuminating a white side wall and the bounce of the light on it outlined the transparency of the branches.

Lighting scheme II

As the main light I placed the same window that I used in the stair landing, but this time slightly oblique sideways to achieve a flat illumination with some volume. In this type of session it is essential to have a Color Checker color chart to guarantee the faithful reproduction of the colors of the garments once the Raw file is processed in Capture One or other similar editing software.

Finally, I set up in the living room of the apartment the last set with a curtain in dark ochre tones that contrasted nicely with some of the kimonos. I kept the main lighting and in this set I also used a second flash on the balcony to generate some backlight in the shots and achieve some transparency in the curtain.

Lighting scheme III

The session was already over, when I found some very golden puff cushions in the living room. I decided to make some short shots of the model but in this case I worked with a strip window to achieve some gradient in the brightness and some volume in the face.