Tag Archive for: natural light

Outside fashion shot for sunglasses with extreme styling and flash Part III : let’s talk storytelling

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This is it

I think we can all agree that gear, lighting, styling, location etc. are all important for a successful shoot. Although during this workshop series we already saw that the location can be transformed quite easily from ok to wow by choosing the right angles and lighting/styling etc.

If you missed the previous ones you can read them here (highly recommended)
Let’s talk about the flash
Let’s talk about gear

Ok so now it’s about story telling, and what do I mean with story telling.

When we look back into history, even as far as the cavemen, the main reason to create “art” was to tell stories. Ranging from one man killing a Bison in the caves to whole paintings containing scenes from the Bible, and everything in between. Now of course there are also still lives and landscapes but I hope you know what I mean 🙂

When we look at what we see online today it’s a boatload of selfies, photos of food or things I can’t mention here. We are bombarded with a huge amount of images every single day. But when is the last time you really stopped to look at something? or when was the last time you were really impressed with an image?

Most of them probably have have the same element

And that’s story telling.
Now story telling can be done in just one image, but also in a series.

During the workshop on location in Emmeloord we find locations that are not immediately awesome, but I show the attendees how, together with an awesome model and styling in this case, you can transform those locations to something great with choosing the right lighting and shooting angles.

This is the second set of that workshop.
For this setup we went to the local beach, we chose a location with some trees behind Nadine and a slight rise.
Nadine brought a lot of Delfts blue we used as props spread around her.
Now the styling on it’s own already did a lot but when I saw that the umbrella was breaking down I decided to also use something else.

Manipulate the sun/ambient light

We talked about this technique a few times in the blog and during digital classroom episodes.
Dragging the shutter.
What I do outside to get the look I like :

  1. First I make sure my cameras EVF is in emulation mode
  2. I will set my camera to “manual” mode and the shutterspeed to 1/125 (when shooting without HSS) and the lowest ISO.
  3. Now I will look through the display and adjust the aperture till I think the scene looks like I want.
  4. Now I will set it ONE stop darker.
  5. Take the Aperture you see in camera for the look you like
  6. Use a lightmeter to meter the strobe at the aperture you liked
  7. start shooting with a shutter speed of 1/60 but with the set aperture

You might wonder why I shoot at 1/60
It’s very easy to explain luckily.
When shooting without HSS I can not shoot faster than 1/125 (sometimes 1/200) this means when I shoot with strobes and I think the background should be darker I have to adjust my strobes, or when I want to experiment I end up with different apertures, meaning different looks due to depth of field. This breaks the total look of a series and can sometimes work and sometimes not.

By adjusting the strobes one stop higher than I thought was perfect and lowering the shutter speed by 1 stop I’m getting the exact result I liked at the start with an added bonus. When I want the background darker I can raise my shutter speed to 1/125 or sometimes 1/200 and get a much darker background, but because I’m shooting with strobes I can also go as a low as 1/30 and sometimes even 1/15th this gives me a nice dynamic range to work with without breaking the look of the shot.

 

The weather

I’m nog just using this technique to adjust the look of the shot, but also to be able to react to changing lighting on location.
And in this case for story telling.
The following series was shot within 5 minutes, so the lighting didn’t really change, however because the umbrella was breaking down I decided to raise the shutter speed and make the whole scene look darker the more the umbrella broke down.

As you can see in the next series, changing the look of a scene by the shutter speed is fast and easy and has a huge impact on the photo. I love to use it.

Let’s first take a look at the gear used :

Annewiek is holding the lightstand on which the Geekoto GT200 is mounted with a large reflector aimed at the model.

And that’s all actually.
So let’s take a look at the results.

Model/Styling : Nadine
Sunglasses : Sparks

www.fotografie-workshops.nl for the Dutch workshops
www.frankdoorhof.com/shop for my gear

Tip : using strobes and natural light

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The difference between strobes and natural light.

 

I always tell my students during workshops that when they are shooting with strobes they should always also shoot some images with natural light, this way you can deliver many different looks from the same location to your client.

 

During the workshops in New York I shot this example which I like to share with you guys.

 

The first image is without strobes.
To meter this correctly I metered (incident) in front of the models face to get a proper exposure on the face, this meant that the windows would blow out to pure white, in the final tinting I toned down the highlights slightly for a more vintage look.

Workshops 5thfloor NY 29-30 August 2014 (6 of 277)

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The change that a strobe can make

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During the location workshops one of the things I always show is the difference between natural light and strobe.
Normally people think that the natural light shots will be much less interesting than the strobe ones, however the end result mostly surprises people.
in this blog post two examples of natural light shots followed by the strobe ones.

 

Enka workshops Augustus 20 2014 274

Enka workshops Augustus 20 2014 280

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California Sunbounce

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I love to play with light, being it ambient light, strobes big or small or whatever as long as I can tell my story I’m happy.
I always tell people that we as photographers are story tellers and light is our language, one can of course just put some words together to make oneself clear but one could also work like a poet and really play with the words. For photographers this translates in just using light to show something, or play with light and create something beautiful.

 

On location it’s not always handy to bring strobes and when you already have a  great looking set and model and plenty of light it’s often even better to just go for the natural light, but…. that being said I always like to work with accents, fill in etc. In the past I’ve used different reflectors for fill in and some extra accents but I never really was super excited about what I could do with them creatively…. that was until I got a California sunbounce from a friend, this thing is awesome.

 

I’m using a larger version and actually only use the silver side to really throw some light in the scene, in fact they are so powerful that one day by accident (yeah Frank) I pointed it inside the studio from outside and Annewiek came running out to see what was going on, the whole studio was brightly lit :D, they are for that matter also not perfect for your models, often the models feel a lot of heat in the burning sun and looking into the light… well it’s not something you will do for pleasure (so counting down 3-2-1 open eyes) will work pretty well.

 

The thing I love about the California Sunbounce I use is that it’s very easy to travel with and assembles pretty fast, but most off all when it’s in the sun…. it REALLY bounces the light. Of course I can write 1000’s words about it, but what about just showing some images I shot during the workshop at Great Fosters in the UK, all were shot with Natural light and the California Sunbounce. You’ve seen the images before but I wanted to tell you a little bit more about the Sunbounce and these images show my point best I think.

 

All images are 100% natural light, and as you can see the pop and accents the Sunbounce give really mimics the way I would normally use strobes in these situations, but Annewiek likes this a lot more 😀 So if you’re shooting a lot with natural light and travel light, check out the California Sunbounce products.

9 Juni 2014 Marie 0025 1

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