Lighting setup for fitness/clothing shoot

[mhailo]

Hi people, any advice on a lighting setup that both emphasises 'fitness' but also shows off the clothing, so not too much contrast/shadows. Up to now i've just used basic set ups but am looking to get more interesting lighting

It will be on a white backdrop. I have 3 speedlights (one to be used to light backdrop), 2 shoot through brollys and a reflector.

Anything better than one from behind (11 o'clock) and one from the front (5 o'clock) and reflector for some fill?

 

[Garry Edwards]

That approach is 100% wrong for your purpose. You NEED to have high contrast, to emphasise the muscles and the clothes.

It's perfectly viable to have low overall contrast combined with high local contrast - personally I never have a clear idea of how I'm going to light anything until it's actually in front of me, but a starting point for this might be to have a large softbox in the fill position (either on axis with the camera or on axis with the direction the model is facing) and a honeycombed light, which could be a honeycombed softbox or a honeycombed something else - beauty dish, standard reflector etc) at an acute angle to define the shape of the body, emphasise the clothing etc. A reflector at the opposite angle, if required, would provide a controlled mitigation of that effect.

Personally, I wouldn't use speedlights for this.

And I wouldn't shoot it against a white background either, this will interfere with and dilute the lighting effects. If it really must be a white background, it would be much better done in PP