Lighting: Spotlight Silhouette

This set up is really easy and a great way of creating strong images with bags of 'pop'. I used an elinchrom Dlite 2it to light the background. it was on a floor stand pointing up at the wall, bare bulb, and set to 3. I then mounted a flash gun with a 1inch deep grid spot attached on a stand. This was set to 1/4 power and placed just infront of the model, slightly off to camera right.

Essentially what this gives me is a wall that's exposed to f11 and a very small spot light that exposes to f8 which i can use to light small areas of the silhouetted model. I set my camera to F8, 1/200th, ISO 100, so that the spotlit area would be correctly exposed, the background slightly over exposed and the shadows nice and black.

The only tricky part with this set up is ensuring that your spotlight is pointing at the right thing. Because a small spotlight is so hyper directional, even small changes in the models position can have a dramatic effect. I've found though, if you make the model aware of this and keep checking and re-adjusting, you'll be fine.