Backlighting

I recently saw some stunning black and white portraits shot with two flashguns, on in front and to the side and the other behind the subject to provide a nice backlit halo effect. It was wet, so I took my little apprentice and part-time model Sarah to the garage and had a go at creating something similar.
The kit was my D90, 50mm f1.8 Nikon lens with my old Nikon SB-28 speedlight and Trish's raher more splendid Canon 580-EX2. The flashes were triggered remotely by a set of youngnuo wireless triggers.

The setup was the SB-28 in front with beauty dish set at 1/2 power with the 580-EX2 behind my subject's head set at 1/4 power. This allowed a shutter speed of 1/60 with a reasonable depth of field for portrait shots.

This gave a nice effect, although having one light off to one side (right) did cause some problems with shadows on the face.

A reflector might have helped here, but I didn't have one handy so opted to move the front light around until we lost most of the shadows.

In terms of processing, Lightroom struggled a bit with the black and white conversions. With a bit of fiddling, the black and white conversion presets that use red and orange filters seemed to work best with the skin tones. Also tried out the bleach bypass preset as well:

I think if we were to try this again, we'd use a reflector for some fill-in light on the other side of the subject's face and hopefully reduce the strength of the front flash gun a little.

Stealing Ideas and Reverse Engineering

So, I saw a cracking set of shots of people in their martial arts outfits/uniforms. Dark, shadows, highlights picked out to one side. Loved them. Loved them so much I decided I would try to reverse engineer the lighting set up with my training buddies from the Aikido club.

 I'd spent some time thinking about the physical set up and was fairly sure that it was a single light off to the right and relatively high up onto a plain black background. That was the easy part. I was shooting in a well lit hall with big banks of florescent lights overhead and was unsure as to how to get the "blacks" in the pictures really black.

My light was a single studio light, shooting thorugh an umbrella onto the subject. I also used my old dawg of a Nikon flashgun to give a little gentle fill in (dialled down to 1/8 power - learned that from the Strobist stuff). The solution to "black" blackswas to ramp the aperture down as small as possible (f22) and keep my ISo at 200. With the studio light and the fill flash, that gave me a  shutter speed of between 1/60 and 1/80 which worked fine for static portrait shots. The big f-stop also gave me the accidental benefit of good depth of field - see the picture of Dave holding the jo (wooden staff) where the jo is in focus from front to back.

Post-processing was done in Lightroom 3. Slight increases in exposure, brghtness and fill light and another slight tickle upwards of the blacks slider. Used the Punch preset to bring out the details on the badges, belts etc.