Spooky Sets & More: Standing Out With Conceptual Portraits

WITH LAURA DARK PHOTOGRAPHY

THE BACKDROP

Hello everyone! This is Laura from Laura Dark Photography, and today we are gonna be doing some spooky shoots. You can kind of get a wide shot here of the background. This is The Skeleton Photo Room by BackgroundTown. I actually designed this—it's in my designer collection. This background is an ultra cloth, which is really nice. It does not wrinkle, as you can see—it came straight out of the package like this. I love the ultra cloth. The colors are beautiful and you can see this is a really detailed background, with lots of cool elements to it and just beautiful, rich colors.

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The Skeleton Photo Room

Skeleton , Black , White Backdrop for Photography

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THE LIGHTING & SETUP

I have my Neewer continuous hot lights with my main light set at 100%, and I have a gridded beauty dish on it. Super simple setup. My backlight is just a white reflective umbrella, and that light is at about 35% power. So, our setup today includes lots of skulls, lots of candles because we're going for that spooky fortune teller vibe. We also have some smoke that we're gonna add in from our Smoke Ninja.

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CAMERA SETTINGS

We're gonna start shooting now, and Robin, our model, is gonna start doing some poses for us. I am using my Canon R5 with a 50 millimeter lens. My settings are about 800 ISO, and I'm at 1/125th of a second at about F3. You can see how that Smoke Ninja adds in that element of magic.

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FINAL IMAGES

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Learn more about Laura Dark on Instagram, Facebook and her website.