Herodiade Chat Noir

This is from a shoot I had with the amazing Herodiade in Chatlet Lumiere, a nice studio not too far from Venice.

The studio, besides a large white seamless background, also has different sets to shoot in, and since I appreciate an environment that looks like “real” places, I naturally chose some of those sets.

I had the choice between using Godox flash and some Nanlite continuous light sources.

I haven’t worked much with Nanlite before, so it was a good opportunity to try it out.

For this particular set, I used two Octoboxes: one with a grid from the right side, and one further back above the camera to soften the shadows and create a little glow in the wallpaper.

While the lights are bright, which makes it easy to see what you are doing, shooting this set required ISO400 and ƒ/2.5 at 1/80 sec, which is a bit on the low side for a studio set. And frankly, I prefer enough light to stay at ISO 100 and at least have a ƒ4 at 1/160, both for depth of field and to freeze the model's motion. So these lamps lack about 4 f-stops of light (each extra f-stop doubles the light, so I'd prefer about 16x the actual output).

I tested the lights on two other sets as well, and none of those changed my opinion.

When shooting in available light, I’ll do what's necessary and make the compromises I need to. But in a controlled (studio) environment with access to power, I want things to be ideal.

If you are on the Photographers or Vault tiers, you can check out the Behind the Scenes movie.

I’ve also posted the original images on Discord, since I edited these a bit to make sure they'd work in a public post.

As always, let me know if you have any questions about any of this.