A chair and Lenaa

Remember the blogpost about using a chair as a prop?
Today a series I shot with Lenaa during our workshop “working on location” where we put the chair in the brutal bright sun (one of the hottest days of the year, yeah I did not know when planning the workshop) and shot with very limited means, some images are done with just the sun, some with the California Sunbounce and some with an Elinchrom ranger RX with Maxilight, can you spot the differences 🙂

The idea is to use props like this in combination with the scene, in this case I loved the brown in the wall and the brown in the chair, but also the contrast with the dress that Lenaa was wearing, making the image complete.

The first thing I will always do when setting something like this up is looking for the color contrasts, I love to find very opposite colors, or like in this case colors that are in the same range. Now it’s very important to let the model pose in the chair, just having her sit doesn’t really work for me (although sometimes it can), stretching the legs making the body long is something I use a lot when posing the model, but I also love a bit more extreme compact poses as you can see in this series.

But it’s also important to walk around your model (again), find different angles, also use some close ups and of course different kind of contrasts. Even when shooting in bright sun you can really play with this and it’s something that a lot of people don’t realize but can be an incredibly powerful tool. Maximize your location and you will get home with much more images than you every thought possible.

And as you can see, not all poses have to be natural.

Also don’t be afraid for the shadows, they can look nasty at first but you will very soon see that if you light everything flat you will loose detail and depth.

 So the next time you’re on location and by accident you find a chair…. well you’re very lucky…. I hope you now have had some tips on making some interesting shots.