Advice?

Off of a light grey poster or mat board?

The only equipment you will need is a tripod, a strobe you can fire off camera and a reflector.

1) Compose the image with ambient lighting only with the camera on a tripod to get the best result. Use all manual settings and record your shutter speed setting. Do not adjust aperture again from this point.

2) Set the strobe and the reflector on opposite sides of the subject as close as you can get without being in the frame. Set your camera's shutter speed to the highest flash mechanical sync speed(probably between 200 and 320). Set the strobe to manual and adjust the power as necessary. Adjust the distance of the strobe and the reflector to subject to achieve the lighting ratio that looks best.

3) Set your shutter speed to 1 stop below where it was in step 1.

4) Adjust the power of the strobe to add as much fill as you need to the ambient lighting.

This should get you in the ballpark. From there you will make small adjustments to the shutter speed and strobe power output to achieve the desired effect. In post processing with Adobe Lightroom or some other post processing software, you can make even smaller adjustments to highlighting and shadow to fine tune the results.

I’ll start this week with the bouncing light and invest in the equipment next payday.

For a writer that fell into social media work, I’m lost creatively. I appreciate it!