Working on location and what does flash do?

During the workshop on location in Emmeloord with our model Claudia the theme is to find locations that might look boring and make them interesting enough for some cool shots. in my opinion this is one of the best things you can do to train yourself to create better images.

The reason most people don’t shoot images close to their home is probably that they see it every day and don’t realise anymore that some locations can be great to shoot images in or against. Every day I walk Chewie I see locations where I think “this would be nice to place a model” but somehow you always travel to cool locations to do the same while in essence you could take the same kind of images close you your own location.

Now of course we do want to introduce also some interesting lighting, because if you just shoot something with ambient light it’s boring right?
Or maybe not….
So during the workshop we actually run through several different lighting solutions.

So today let’s take a look at what you can do with just an open parking place.

Let’s start out with ambient light only.

A low angle and a standard preset I created in Luminar AI (you can get those on frankdoorhof.com/shop)

Now let’s add a just a slight amount of flash.
I’m using a Hensel Porty with a 14″ reflector here and to get this effect you really don’t need a lot of power, in essence I’m overpowering the ambient by just 1-1.5 stops.

With retouching you could get something similar quite easily.
Now one of the limitations of shooting with the Hensel Porty is that you are limited to the X-sync which in most cases lies between 1/125 and 1/200. So you will mostly shoot on smaller apertures when using a lot of power. This is why I’m using a variable magnetic ND filter on my lens when shooting with the porty system outside.

I’m using the K&F concept version which you can find in the Frank Doorhof kit which includes 2 Black diffusion filters (1/4 and 1/8) and the variable ND filter, all magnetic of course.

Ok, so now let’s add a lot of light.

Here I’m totally overpowering the ambient light and also chose a different angle to enhance the contrast even more.
One might say…”hey this is cheating because we don’t see the sky anymore”
So of course I also shot some with the sky included but we did move the set a bit to make the series more varied.

This is something I always highly recommend.
If you shoot all images from the same angle and in the same location it can be very nice but also a bit boring, and you don’t have to travel or even walk to another location, it’s often a matter of choosing a location where you can shoot from different angles and create something new with every angle. It doesn’t only speed up your workflow but also give your client much more different images for the same price, so they will be much more willing to hire you again for another job.

As you can see there is a huge difference between the first and last images.
However in reality it’s “only” the difference in lighting and by choosing different angles.

So the next time you are shooting on location look around for areas that can be shot from different angles and don’t be afraid to shoot with or without strobes.