One of the things I always try to “push” towards the attendees during my workshops is maximizing the looks you can get from one location. Most photographers will start out on a location and decide whether or not to use strobes for example, and…. well that’s it, they will shoot the location with (or without) strobes.

 

In my opinion that’s a waste of a great opportunity, when you setup for strobes it’s very easy to also shoot some images without strobes (just power down your trigger), in this blog post a sample of the same location shot once with natural light and once with strobes. As you can see you get 2 complete different looking sets from the same location, this way your client can always choose.

 

The shots were taken with the new Sony A7r.
As you can see in the natural light shots the dynamic range of the camera is pretty impressive, there is still detail in the windows, and when you pull back more highlights you can even see some trees but somehow I found that not fitting for the natural light shots.

 

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Today a small tip on mimicking the sun if it was there before but not when you take the shot.
In this case when we started out on this location the sun was awesome coming through the windows, however as soon as it was time to shoot the scene with our model the sun was gone, now one could say “ok that’s a shame let’s go” however that’s of course not the solution because I really liked the location.

 

In this case the windows were not transparant but acted actually as a sort of diffuser, meaning if the sun was shining you would get a very nice even light, as you can see in this shot which was taken just a few moments before the model shots.

However as mentioned before, when it was time for the model part…. well the sun was gone (normal Dutch behavior). So how do you solve this?

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