Cheap can be more fun than you think

I hear it all the time

“my lens is cheap”, “I have an old camera”, “I only have one strobe” etc.
In all honesty, of course gear is important but you can create awesome art/photos etc. with your phone nowadays. My moto over the year has been “if people look at the quality of the pixels the image is not strong enough” that doesn’t mean you can just “wing” it and don’t care about your gear, but it shouldn’t be the main focus.

The same goes for sets.
When people look at my portfolio a lot of people don’t realize that most of the shots are done during the workshops or events. And as you will understand we don’t have a lot of time to create sets, and of course we love to stay in budget, and that’s what’s todays blogpost is about.

Fun and cheap

With photography it helps when we don’t focus on light but on shadows, this is something you probably heard from day 1. The shadows tell you almost everything about the lightsource used, the angle, distance etc. but one step further is to realize we don’t really work with light but with reflections.
This is also explains why we can use black reflectors to take out the shine on someone’s head for example.

And don’t we just love it when something get’s a beautiful “glow” in a shot?
Reflections can be a problem but also something really cool you can use in your image.
Today we take a look at some very cheap material you can buy in most party shops. It’s called (well at least this one) holographic material and we used it to build a nice background for one of the sets during a workshop. You can even get it in different kinds of color.

A good technique is to use your phone and shine over material, this will show you how the material reflects and should give you a good idea how to use in your shoot.

When I use my phone to shine over this material it immediately started top glow, so for this setup I knew we could hit the background with some harsh light for some extra contrast and “oomph” in the shot. If you shoot this with a soft box it can work fine too, but it will be a lot less extreme. So on the model I’m using the Nanlite Fresnel spot (this is one of my favorite modifiers for a great classic high contrast look). The nice thing about a Fresnel is that you focus your light and even when you use it on the extreme settings it still has a wonderful effect on the skin of the model.

To make sure the material also shines and to get some nice color effects I’ve placed two Geekoto GT200’s with the Rogue magnetic system with a red gel on one side and a blue gel on the other.

Together they created a very nice blend of color and light on the model, plus the material gave a wonderful glow, especially when our model leaned forward.
So let’s take a look at the results from this setup, and in the next blogpost I show the behind the scenes video.

During the workshops we always try to do 3-4 totally different sets and this is just one 😀
Also want to visit a workshop?
visit fotografie-workshops.nl for more information, the workshops are in Dutch but if you let us know a few weeks in advance we can switch to English.
Don’t want to travel?
It’s also possible to book a full day 1:1 online workshop, see here for more info.