Natural light plus strobes = awesomeness

When working on location often people make the choice to use strobes…. or not.
I strongly believe however that you should always use both.
By making use of totally different looks during a photoshop you will have a much more varied end result than when using only strobes or only natural light. People who read this blog daily have seen me saying this before, so let’s add something more today.

During the all my workshops I try to trigger my students to use light in many different ways/angles and this way controlling the contrast in a shot, or in short, chance the look of the shot. Now one could say “On location I have to work fast, so I don’t have time to move my lights constantly” well… I agree, but you actually don’t have to move your lights, when you move yourself you can get some amazing results, especially when you shoot in a scene where there is an interesting view from all angles.

Take for example the following shot.

I used two Sony strobes for this on full power to create a day to night effect. Now there is not much wrong with this shot, it’s pretty nice, the pose is nice and of course the model…. well is amazing :D, however when I move myself to a different angle we get something that I personally would label as “much more interesting”

Now one could think that I shoot straight into the sun….. but that’s not true, in this case what you see are actually both Sony strobes, I cloned out the stands and there you are, the shot is much more interesting and for me has a more “awesomeness” feel.

However when shooting outside I also always advise to shoot with natural light.
You could use the same filtering as with the shots above.

And as you can see we now have a completely different look, but it can be even more interesting when I also start chancing the tint of the images and move even closer to my model PLUS (and I can’t stress this enough) really start coaching my model to get “that” killer look.

Nice but not “killer” look enough…. so let’s take it one step further.

And we ended up with this one.
Do remember these shots were taken during the workshop so time is limited and I also have to teach, so the results can be better if we have the time to push a little bit more. The idea however is to really try to shoot the model the way the image gets a certain feel, something that “moves” “get” the viewer.

So the next time you’re outside, try to not only change your angles or shoot with just natural light and strobes but also try to get that one extra step and really try to get that killer look from your model.