127
I can see three very clear aspects that all three photos share, so let's concentrate on those.
Two can be done in camera, the third is a software process.
I didn't have time to costume a collection of actors or find a nice medieval-style location... but I have a toy bear & my living room, with a bookcase in the corner.
I didn't set up any lighting for ...
55
There are two ways to go about accomplishing this - in camera and in post.
Both techniques will rely on shooting a rim-lit subject.
Put a flash behind the subject. In my image, I actually had the flash cranked up WAY too much, so I'm getting additional light acting as fill (bouncing off the couch and back toward the front of the subject):
Set-up below ...
41
Directly with regards to the lighting:
Much of her recent work has strong light sources from behind the main subject(s). About 45° (either to the side or a combination of to the side and above) from directly behind the subject seems to be the most common angle in her examples on instagram. She's not afraid to let the highlights go to get the shot she wants.
...
20
Background bokeh straight out of camera
The above picture isn't necessarily a composite. You can achieve a similar effect straight out of camera.
Here's a picture I took almost 10 years ago:
And here's the setup:
SB600+gridspot, back camera right, 1/16, 85mm
SB25+Plusgreen gel, camera left, 1/64, 24mm.
One chair as a big gobo to prevent light from ...
20
There are two main elements I see in your example images:
Contrast
These images have relatively low contrast. The brightest whites are nowhere near pure white. They're light grey. The darkest blacks are nowhere near pure black. They're dark grey. You can do this by reducing overall contrast, by lightening up the shadows (also known as reducing the blacks, ...
14
I'm not seeing this as particularly pastel. What I do see is a very common and popular look we get asked about a lot, often does described as a "old film effect". (See also this and this.)
The black point this slightly raised. The deepest blacks are shown as medium/dark gray.
A color cast is applied. In this case, yellowish.
And that's really all there ...
14
The key is to find areas of the image with a lot of parallax, such as a foreground building and a background tree. Try to pick a point as close to one edge of frame as possible. Now walk left/right (green) to find the correct point of intersection from the old photograph.
Now that you've done that, you've established a straight line to move along (red).
...
14
The setup is relatively simple but to do this as one shot you will need space. An awful lot of space. Doing this indoors in a regular sized house is not going to work, the walls/ceiling are going to reflect light back filling in the shadows and you wont get the fading-into-black effect.
The easiest way to shoot this (short of renting a studio) would be to ...
13
I'm the photographer, who made the picture, and I used Photoshop to make the strings invisible holding the lenses.
This is not a composite. The picture was made from 1 shot. The CE logo on the lens confuses people, because it looks like it's upside down, but actually it's reflected from a mirror.
13
I recognize this exact picture - I've seen it before. There are two photography magazines that I read that showed how to do this exact type of family portrait.
This was done in a home with a simple black background. One article uses a softbox slightly off to the side and behind the subject. The other article uses a speedlight with a simple grid straight on (...
12
Look at the shadows under the cars. Now look at the shadow under the model... Oh wait! This looks to be more about how it was lit and exposed when shot than how it was post-processed.
This photo is not really as much about the lens, the camera, or the post-processing. It is more about the off camera lighting illuminating the model and what that allows with ...
12
I think it combines two techniques:
strong backlight (also known as contre-jour)
fill-flash to add light to the details of subjects
It can be created using lighting setups (absolutely artificial lighting), or using natural light as well (like sunset).
11
Have a DOG sniff out blur in the photos.
If you're going to be penalizing for digitally enlarged photos, you might as well penalize for out-of-focus photos too. The blurred edges and details in both cause the same bad experience for viewers, regardless of whether it is caused by a small original or poor focus. What you want to do is detect blur, which is an ...
11
Is there something important to say about the light in the portraits of Charles?
There is. There is no mastering of light here. It's always diffused natural light, either from an overcast sky or very large windows, with very little shadows. No risk taken, just the very basics and lots of color retouch in post. The catchlights in the eyes here and here show ...
10
I'm not quite sure why you're so skeptical; it's well-explained and the explanation seems plausible. To respond to your particular points, having read the page:
The setup with the stool and glass is used for the photos where the snowflakes are on the glass and backlit. They are on the glass, 2.5-3cm away from the lens. The rings on the front of the lens (...
10
Agree with some of the previous answers, but not all of it...
Golden Hour, for sure - highlights under the arm, camera right, & the reflection in his pressure gauge, look to match what we can see of the sky.
Additional lighting camera right; broad white, not too high & not too far off-centre. Look at the catchlights in the eyes & highlight on ...
10
There are two distinct characteristics that most of these images share - colour palette & 'hazy glow'.
Let's tackle them separately.
I'm always tempted to think that any edit was done as easily as possible rather than as complicatedly as possible...
Comparing the first set of 'Ravenclaw' pictures to the 2nd 'cup' image, the only real shared ...
9
I can see two possible ways this shot was done:
Light was injected where the cartridge would go. We can't really see what is back there in the picture. Some LEDs could have been carefully placed inside or almost inside the gun, and the wires run so that they would be obscured in the picture.
A beam splitting mirror was used. The camera was looking thru ...
8
It's a fact that using two lenses with one reversed works. Here are a few quick examples that I shot by combining two lenses:
50mm with 50mm reversed:
50mm with 28mm reversed:
105mm with 28mm reversed:
These were quick, dirty, and hand held -- I held the camera with one hand and held the reversed lens against the camera lens, focusing simply by moving ...
8
It is very important to understand the difference between a high dynamic range image, and a high dynamic range image that has been tonemapped back down to low dynamic range for display on a standard monitor.
This is a high dynamic range image that has been produced from multiple exposures:
Looks dull and lifeless because you're viewing it on a low dynamic ...
8
This not a thing that can happen. Cameras just don't work that way. For that matter, light doesn't work that way.
Specifically, for digital cameras: every "photosite" — each individual pixel-level sensor — is just a counter of photons. It doesn't have any sense of the wavelength of the light received, and correspondingly no perception of color. In order to ...
8
This looks very much like a the photographer duplicated the image as a new layer, used a large radius Gaussian blur, and then set the blending mode to "overlay". It's the same effect I used in this photo:
You get a soft focus effect but with crisp details, and a boost to the saturation. They have also reduced the contrast by bringing the black ...
8
To me this looks like a composite - the family members look too close together to not be clashing shoulders.
If it is a composite then you can use the trick @Math-grum mentions of using a smallish softbox very close up on each person in turn and you'll need much less space for the light to drop off to black.
It will also be easier to get a shot where ...
8
You might want to search for "rim light" or "back light" techniques. Couldn't quickly find an existing question that looked close enough to match that particular usage. But that's basically a (low powered?) flash hidden behind the couple and pointed toward the camera to light just the edges of their profiles. Looks like it might be gelled to give the blue ...
8
The effect is called Grain and you can find it in pretty much any photo editor, from Photoshop and Gimp to Instagram and Telegram. In my example I'm going to use Gimp.
The original Picture is from Slartibartfast's hall of fame submission (May 2018):
To add some basic grain in Gimp, use the Filters -> Noise -> HSV Noise:
You may wanna sharpen (...
7
This is a duotone/split-tone image (between pink(ish) and green(ish)) + black.
The contrast is lowered, and colors are replaced from a gradient between pink and green.
You see this as "soft" because of reduced saturation, reduced contrast and reduced color jumps.
You see this as warm because the black point is increased (consequence of the reduced ...
7
Photoshop has certainly been used somewhere along the line. Either the 'floating' lenses and flashgun were photographed separately in the same lighting conditions and then composited into the main shot, or the photographer used string or fishing line to suspend them somehow and then Photoshopped it out.
7
The softness is not a Lightroom settings change. It is restricted depth of field, created by opening up the lens' aperture to various degrees.
The strength of this effect appears (!) greater in your second example. To see if you can create it with a typical cheap kit lens, I tried to replicate that sort of scene here, using a 28-105mm f/3.5 lens racked out ...
7
The biggest source of information about a lighting setup are the
highlights in the eyes.
You see one big blob of white in the upper half of it. This is very
likely a one light setup. And that light comes from the top.
Next thing to find out is what kind of light it is. For that, look at the shadows. The top hair provides a shadow line to examine. Even ...
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