Three Shades of Gray: Zach & Jody’s Lighting Breakdowns

Nashville-area photography team Zach and Jody Gray not only have the business of wedding photography down to a science, but they’re bona fide lighting experts to boot. Here, Zach breaks down his setups behind three images.

Photos © Zach Gray | Zach and Jody Photography

Smoke in Your Eyes
Zach enlisted his actor/musician friend Jason Bynum as his subject for the sole purpose of creating personal work to keep his portfolio fresh. With Bynum positioned in front of a gray seamless background set up in the Gray’s garage, Zach says he was going for a split-lighting look with ”a gritty, textured skin tone and cool, ethereal smoke effect.”

Using a 27-inch Elinchrom beauty dish with a 25-degree grid because “it creates this dead spot in the center so the light goes on evenly,” Zach added no diffusion, allowing the dish’s silver interior to create punchiness and texture. “I put that light really close to his face just outside the frame of the shot camera right, and angled down slightly,” Zach says.

On camera left, he added a black flag to absorb light and keep it focused. “When you’re shooting indoors, naturally some of that light’s going to bounce off the walls and fill in the shadows, and I didn’t want that,” he says. “I wanted crazy contrast.”

The smoke effect was the tricky part—naturally, there wasn’t quite enough when he shot the subject to create the texture Zach was looking for. He asked Bynum to step out of the frame, and blow cigarette smoke into it, while Zach used his back button focus to capture the smoke. In post-production, Zach took the best of both frames (one portrait, one smoke) and composited them to create the final shot.

LOCATION: The Grays’ garage CAMERA: Canon 5D Mark III LENS: 85mm f/1.2 EXPOSURE: f/5.6 at 1/160th of a second ISO: 100 | See the behind-the-scenes video.

Stylized Fence Hop
Zach found a sunny, side-lit fence a block away from his home for this promotional shoot for the band Likewise. Zach says the guys in the band worried the image would look too soft and “country,” but the photographer assured them he was going for a flash-heavy, moody “painted-on” look.

Using two main light sources did the trick: First, a 59-inch Zeppelin Octabank from Westcott at camera left (from the direction of the sun), which Zach says focuses and “puts out the most stunning, beautiful light.”

To fill in the shadows caused by the aggressive lighting ratio (the background was two stops under-exposed), Zach placed an Elinchrom 20-inch halo light to camera right, “two stops underexposed from the main light so there’s still some contrast, but we don’t lose all the details on the shadow side of the body,” he says. “When you go more than one stop under on the background (ambient light), it starts to look Photoshoppy, but that’s what helps creates that painted-on effect.”

And because he was shooting in the middle of the day with all that flash power, Zach used a neutral density filter from LEE Filters on his lens (“basically sunglasses for your camera”) so he could go from shooting at f/16 to f/5.

LOCATION: Neighborhood fence, Franklin, Tennessee CAMERA: Canon 5D Mark III LENS: 85mm f/1.2 EXPOSURE: f/5 at 1/160th of a second ISO: 100 | See the behind-the-scenes video.

Glamour Lit Portrait
Zach used a 39-inch Westcott Zeppelin softbox to demonstrate a feathering technique for this portrait session at Westlight Studios in Franklin, Tennessee. When glamour light is typically positioned straight on, Zach says this light angle can often lead to a flat photo. To add more depth and texture, he did what he calls “table topping”—pointing the light down at the floor in front of the subject and moving her forward so the light source only grazes her face, making it indirect or “feathered off.”

“You still get that really nice catch-light in her eyes,” Zach says, “but you also get this beautiful, chiseled-out texture and shadows under the chin.”

For the background, Zach took an overhead light set to two stops below the f/11 key light at f/5.6. “It’s shooting through a 7-inch reflector and a 20-degree grid, so it gives a vignette look,” he says. Although the backdrop was actually blue-gray, Zach put an orange tungsten (half CTO) gel over the light to match the warmth of the model’s headband.

“Anytime I shoot that background light, I put it nice and high, and then angle it down and try to hit right behind her head so it creates this beautiful vignette.”

LOCATION: Westlight Studios, Franklin, Tennessee CAMERA: Canon 5D Mark III LENS: 85mm f/1.2 EXPOSURE: f/2.5 at 1/160th of a second ISO: 50 | See the behind-the-scenes video.

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