When photographing glossy nails in a studio setting using a softbox, you might find that there is an annoying white streak obscuring the nail art. I’ve been calling this “glare” for lack of a better term.
A photo I took of Renee’s nails, with a white streak visible. 1/100s, f/8, ISO 200
This glare is unflattering and it makes the nail art harder to see. The whole point of the photo is to show off the art!
It took me a frustratingly long time to learn that the glare is only visible on the camera because the softbox is orders of magnitude brighter than the environment. The relative brightness was too high. I needed to balance two properties of the setup:
- Speedlight should add enough illumination to the scene to get sufficient exposure for
1/100sf/8ISO 200. - Ensure that there is not a single concentrated bright spot which has greater illumination than the environment.
My solution (which still needs work) is to set the speedlight to maximum power, point the softbox at the ceiling, and take the shot. This way, I could vary the height of the softbox to control the size of the illuminated area of the ceiling: lower softbox means bigger spread, with less resulting power.
How I had the softbox arranged.
This gave the light a soft, diffused quality, even softer than the softbox on its own. I observed that the relative brightness of the glare was much lower compared to the rest of the nail art. I made sure to carefully angle the softbox so as to not have any softbox light spill onto the subject.
Same shot as before, with the ceiling used as a massive bounce. Flash power had to be at maximum. 1/100s, f/8, ISO 250
I was using a Godox AD200 speedlight with an 80cm Neewer octagonal softbox. Shooting on my Sony A7III with the Sony 85mm GM.
You can view the rest of my nail photography work on Renee’s nail account @naiilsbynaii, where I experiment with different lighting for each shot.