How I did it. Black and white artistic nude photography. A light diagram

Artistic nude photography is one of my favourite kind of photography and something I really enjoy taking on black and white film. Here is a picture I made some time ago and the diagram of lights I used.

TMax400 - f8 - t1/125

This picture was taken on a Kodak TMax 400 with a Medium Format camera. The model was quite small as well as the space. in order to enhance her height I used a 50mm lens (which is an angular lens in MF) and positioned the camera really close to her right knee and played with perspective. The position of the legs and the right arm helped to my purpose, conferring to the whole image a certain dynamism.

As you can see in the diagram below, I used a three point light setting. The Key Light was a 1000w flash with square softbox on camera right, slightly tilted down at 1/2 power. I flagged it to avoid light spells on the background.

On the left of the camera I put a 500w flash also with softbox, the Fill light, at 1/4 of the power and more distant from the model than the Key light in order to fill up the shadows on the legs but at the same time to achieve the contrast I wanted. It was also flagged to prevent the light to fall on the background and more areas of the body other than the legs.

I placed the Background light behind the model, at 1/2 the power and with a snoot, which created   the circle of light at her back.

I used a yellow filter Y8 to get a brighter skin tone and shot at f8 and t1/125.

I like film grain very much and normally I want them to gain presence in the print, so control it with agitation during the development of the negative.

The image was then scanned and went trough Photoshop only to place the watermark and to reduce it to web size.

Hope you enjoyed this post, now it's time to practise!