Tag Archive for: glamour

Cheap can be more fun than you think

Is gear important?

I hear it all the time: the focus on gear.

“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 motto 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 not care about your gear, but it shouldn’t be the main focus.

The same goes for sets. They are important too.
When people look at my portfolio, a lot of people don’t realize that most of the shots were taken during workshops or events. As you will understand, we don’t have a lot of time to create sets, and of course, we love to stay on budget, and that’s what today’s blog post is about: Cheap sets.

Fun and cheap sets

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 light source used, the angle, distance etc., but one step further is to realize we don’t really work with light but with reflections.
This also explains why we can use black reflectors to take out the shine on someone’s head, for example.

Reflections and shine

And don’t we just love it when something gets 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 colors.

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

Fresnel for high contrast

When I used my phone to shine over this material, it immediately started to 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 blog post, I show the behind the scenes video.

cheap sets

During the workshops, we always try to do 3-4 totally different sets, and this is just one :D. We often try to create cheap sets.
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.

The Geekoto Lantern in action

Some light sources are special

The moment you see the Geekoto Lantern you know exactly what you’re going to get.
A beautiful soft light from the front of the softbox, but also a lot of light emitted from the sides.
This makes the lantern the perfect softbox for new born, product and fashion photography when you need a lot of light but don’t want the light too harsh and the edge transfers on the set. The lantern does exactly this.

In this behind the scenes video I use it for a full body quick to setup fashion shoot.

 

Using the optical snoot for a great window effect

Gobo projectors are great for special effects

I love using the Lindsay Adler optical snoot from Westcott as my main lightsource as you have seen many times, but it’s also great for the more subtle effects.
Today in the blog I take you behind the scenes during a workshop where I use the optical snoot for a very subtle but great effect on our model/set.

A chair and a background an we are done, well almost

Building a small set is loads of fun

And it doesn’t has to be expensive.
For our studio we are always looking for chairs, chandeliers, and in fact almost anything we thing we can use in a photoshoot, in the end we will probably open a thrift store 😀

As you know we use ClickBackdrops backgrounds in our studio, and for the Netherlands we have been the distributor for a while now.
When I advise someone which backgrounds to get it’s always very depending on the type of photography of course.
But one of the tips I always give is to get at least one so called “scenic” backdrop.
in our case I’m using the “boho drapes” background

I love this background because it’s very easy to build a small set with a chair and some branches.
By adding an accent light with a red gel I absolutely love the warm mood you can get from this set, of course the styling and our model Janaika also adds a lot to the final result 😀

But as you can see, it’s always nice to change clothing during a set.
Personally I love both outfits equal, but the red is very striking in this setup.

Adding some slight glow to the image will give it a very nice old fashioned glamour look.
Back to the old days of Hollywood, but now in color.

And finally I could not resist to shoot one image from the side for some high contrast portraiture.

Also want to visit a workshop?
Visit www.fotografie-workshops.nl for more info.