Glamour- and Lingerie-shots often benefit from simple lightings.
Rather more important than a lot of light(s) is the well-directed control over the light. Especially in this genre you get more exciting pictures when combining soft light with directed shadows. The soft light flatteres the skin and emphasizes a rather romantic mood.
However, there’s a great danger of getting a flat and boring picture because of straying light and too little light control. Thereby, besides the soft light, you have to use shadows to emphasize or conceal and to maintain the three-dimensional look.
For the picture above I used exactly 1 flash coming from straight above and lighting the whole length of the model. To get the light into this position above the model lying down, I used a boom stand.
The light former used was a striplight (30 by 180 cm). As it was pretty close the light was very soft, yet still very controllable because of the shape and qualities of the light former. Thus I could use selected shadows to emphasize body shapes and to give the image more depth.
However, I won’t keep secret that the light former wasn’t able to light the model absolutely evenly at this close of a distance. There was a “hot spot” to the middle of the model and it produced a light fall-off to the top (head) of the model. I had to compensate for that in the raw converter.
