About technique and more.
One of the things I absolutely love to do is using materials to control my lights in ways that are not “standard”.
You can of course use a metal sheet with holes to create some nice patterns, however if you make the holes “small” enough you can use it to place the model behind it and the reflection of the material will actually bounce back to the model.
In this case I used one strobe with a red gel and one standard strobe just for fill in.
Model : Lenaa.
There will be that moment where you have to mix two different light sources in a scene.
Now normally it’s common to gel the strobes to match the color temperature of the other light source, but sometimes it can be very interesting to keep the color temperature different.
In this shot (shot during a glamour workshop) I shot our model Lenaa on the chair and lit her with the 70cm deep octa and a custom grid from Honeycombgrids the tungsten lights on the back are in fact 100W bulbs. I made sure that the light sources didn’t really “overlap” but that the tungsten had free play on the background, this way the tungsten lights look really nice and warm and it gives a nice glow to the background. The suitcases gives the shot some extra dimension.
When shooting something like this, do make sure that you put the strobes on the LOWEST possible power setting, this way you can actually see the tungsten lights. If you meter everything on 1/125 you can still open up more to let in more of the tungsten bulbs (1/60 or even 1/30). Always remember that the aperture in these cases control the strobe and the shutter speed the tungsten lights.
I know a lot of photographers are looking for interesting things to “spice” up a shoot.
This can be a chair, a guitar etc….. but also think even more simple, what about an old window ?
We got this window from the local junkyard for little and it has proved to be an amazing prop that can be used in many different ways, this time we put our model Lenaa behind it, sprayed some water on the window and used a strobe from the back to get the final image you see here (shot during a glamour workshop).
Expressions are very important in our daily life, imaging talking to someone that shows no expression at all….. pffff terrible right?
Still I see a lot of photographs when I do portfolio reviews that show great lighting, awesome locations, great styling and makeup but they don’t work, they don’t trigger me… for the simple reason….. there is no expression.
For me it’s always a challenge to bring out expressions from my models that are special, a bit over the top, a bit provoking maybe but most of all they must make my viewer go like WOW. As you can see in the following two shots the background isn’t that interesting, but the wind and the expression of the model (plus pose) really make the images speak (well at least for me).
So next time you’re on a location of which you think “this is not that interesting” always remember that with some special coaching and a model that has some real expression/guts you can make it work.
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