With studio photography we often forget that we can use strobes very creativity.
We press the shutter and the strobe fires…. right?
Well yeah in most cases that’s the way it works, unless your trigger doesn’t work of course, in which case you have to press again.

With the release of the Elinchrom ELC units there was a new feature called “delayed”, there are many new features but today it’s about this one. The Delayed setting makes it possible to trigger the strobes after an XXXXX amount of time, for example 3 seconds. This means you press the shutter and…. nothing happens, but after 3 seconds (or any other time) the strobe fires, you could call it second curtain sync, but trust me its MUCH more flexible, because you can also set for example 3 strobes up in different times, but I don’t want to go to extreme today.

The nice thing is that this feature is not necessary to do cool effects, you can of course also just put the camera on a tripod and open up the shutter and after 2-3 seconds press a skyport/other remote, it gives the “same” effect you just have to time it yourself.

In the following shots we used LedGo led panels (but you can also the modeling lights of another strobe) to give us continues light, and after 3 seconds the ELC was fired. Now these were shot during a workshop so I didn’t really have time to create something that was really cool (that takes a lot of tries) but you can see the effect, and I included 4 more images we shot a while ago with Nadine where I did have some more time.

The image on top is what I call a VERY lucky shot, this was done my moving around myself, the model and zooming, I just LOVED the crop as it came out of the camera so I made it black and white, added some contrast and voila….. well ok this image was actually sharp (inside joke, don’t worry if you don’t get it)

Lighting a model isn’t as easy as 123 just throw the strobe somewhere.
Sometimes when people see me lighting a set it might look that way, but remember that I’ve done it before (at least a few times), and in my mind I already have a pretty good idea about what I want to do.

One of the most made mistakes, and hey this is my opinion, is to light the model too flat when the idea is to create a nice dark atmosphere. First of all I would advise to start with gridded strobes, this means you can really steer the light towards your subject and create a sort of spot effect. The next thing is actually light your subject from an angle, this way you can create more contrast. You can also achieve this of course by moving around your subject.

Sounds weird or complicated?
Let’s show you.
These shots were done during a recent cosplay set.

Here we have the model lit properly but it’s…. well a bit boring.

There’s nothing really wrong with the image itself, the model is lit from an angle, the set shows up, but…. well I just don’t “feel” the shot.
So let’s change my position.

In my opinion much much better.
The problem is however that we are shooting a cosplayer and not a model that knows exactly what to do in front of the camera, now don’t get me wrong she was awesome but sometimes it’s hard to pose for a still image, so as a photographer you should help out, and one of the best things is actually give the model something to do, make her “experience” the pose. In this case we used her dragons (her own idea by the way). And as you can see the image looks a lot better.

My model now has a real sense of that something is going on and I love the lighting and angle in this shot.

So the next time you shoot something, MOVE around the set, find that contrast, don’t always go for the “straight on lighting”, but really work the angles.
Good luck.