No rest for the... busy photographer!

Hey everybody. Well as usual it has been a busy week and a half, and I have to say – I love it. But, and mercifully for you all, it means that this will be a pretty short blog post!

The images I have included are a selection of shots taken from a fashion shoot I did last weekend. The vision (pun intended) was to use the long straight stretch of road as the runway, but the road edge also serves as a nice set of lead in lines drawing the eye to the model.

Lighting was a little tricky for this shoot. As Google limits the number of images I can put on the blog, I have placed a couple of images on my website here of the rig I used. The tricky thing about it is that I did not have an assistant for the shoot, so everything had to be pretty much “Set and Forget”.

At the risk of stating the obvious, for a fashion shoot the hero of the image is the outfit, the models are (sorry girls!) mere hangers for the outfits to hang on. Of course though I wanted to light the models face a little more than the outfit to create a more balanced image. I guess the point I am trying to make here is that for portraiture or modelling photography, the lighting is primarily (as a rule) only on the subjects face.

I wanted to try and position the models in the shade created by the trees and overpower the shadows using artificial and reflected light. For lighting the models outfit I used the reflector mounted on the boom stand. This had to be repositioned/double checked for every outfit as of course the sun was slowly setting in the late afternoon sky. I basically aimed the light from the reflector at the models hip, but in reality it was lighting from their ankle to their shoulder.

This left my beloved beauty dish to light the models face and shoulders. I took the grid spot that is almost permanently attached to the beauty dish off as I wanted a little more spread on the light to give a more natural feel, and if you look at the images you cannot see any shadow on the road from that light source which would otherwise confuse the shadows on the other side of the models being created by the gorgeous afternoon sunlight. I was pretty happy with that. Point to note: as you look at the image, the beauty dish and reflector were on the left (models right side). The flash head itself was a Bowens Gemini 500WS powered by a Bowens Travel Pack battery pack, and the whole thing was triggered by using Bowens Pulsar radio triggers. All of which leads me nicely into this week’s video…

We have mentioned a few times in previous videos about how I always trigger the studio lights by using the Bowens Pulsar radio triggers, so this video goes into a little detail as to how they work and are configurable for a variety of uses and multiple lighting set-ups at once.

Well, that’s it for this blog post. Take care everyone and I’ll catch you next time!