One of the most important things for me is story telling.
Without a little bit of story telling a shot is not 100% done for me.
Now story telling can be in a good expression, but also in something more extreme.
In yesterdays blogpost I showed a huge change in changing angles, but as you can see the image gets way more interesting when we add a small prop…. in this case an old gas mask, and the pose helps a lot of course.
I tell this many times during the workshops but choosing the right angle is very important.
A lot of people will be familiar by the effect that moving the light source has, however often one forgets that when you move around yourself the effect is actually the “same”. On location this can be an a very powerful tool as you can see in the examples today.
First we see the image shot from the front.
Often light is coming from the front or the side, however it can be very interesting to use light from the back.
Now how do you meter something like this?
In fact it’s very simple.
An incident light meter will meter the light falling on the subject and give you the correct reading, if you put that value in your camera you’re subject will be properly lit. Now a lot of people tell you different things about light meters, ranging from “you don’t need one” to ….. well let’s put it this way a lot of confusion is caused.
Trust me when I tell you that a light meter is just a tool, it gives you a way to very quickly get a proper exposure and it’s not hard to use. As you can see in these examples I metered the front of the face of the models and put that exposure in the camera, the only light source used is an Elinchrom Ranger behind the model, so the “scatter light” actually lights the model and is metered. In a studio environment it will often (99.9%) means you’re metering towards the light source, but as you see with this setup I now actually metered towards the camera. Just remember that you hold the meter in front of the area you want to be correct and meter “the light” that is hitting THAT area, it can be the strobe straight on, but also scatter light or ambient light.
One of the things that’s always a guarantee for a good shot (or an interesting shot) is using reflections.
Reflections can be seen in many surfaces, but also in water of course.
So when you’re shooting in a location where you see some pools of water make sure to figure out a way to use it in at least some of your shots.
