One of the most important things for me is story telling.
Without a little bit of story telling a shot is not 100% done for me.
Now story telling can be in a good expression, but also in something more extreme.
In yesterdays blogpost I showed a huge change in changing angles, but as you can see the image gets way more interesting when we add a small prop…. in this case an old gas mask, and the pose helps a lot of course.
One of the things I absolutely love to do when traveling is finding places that are a bit “weird” or different. And in Denmark we wanted to visit two of these sites, the first is a lighthouse that was captured by sand (later more on this) and one was the absolute top of Denmark called Skagen. This is where both the Skagerrak and Kattegat come together, this gives a very dangerous situation and this is why swimming is not allowed in this area.
When you arrive in the location there is a huge parking and a small tractor bringing you to the point…. we of course decided to walk, it was only 500mtrs…. well that must have been the longest 500 mtrs ever, but we are used to walking so it was more than doable but if you are a bit less fit make sure to take the tractor, walking through the sand is pretty heavy.
On the way to the destination you pass some old bunkers, which of course also are interesting to visit, but that’s not why we where here, but I of course had to take some quick snaps 😀
The face is an incredibly important part of a shoot, it’s where we get the expressions from, and of course it’s the first thing we look at.
So we have to make sure the face is always correctly lit and visible, right?
Well most of the times yes, but sometimes it can be very nice to play a bit with masks.
The nice thing is that first of all the mask itself will have some form of expression, but the thing that really draws me towards the use of masks is the way some of them respond to the light and what’s also very obvious is that when the model wears a mask she/he will have to work more with the body to create the look/expression you want, and this can give some interesting shots especially when you start combining it with some harsh shadows.
In this blogpost some images I shot with Anna during a webinar last week.
Often I’m asked what kind of setups I use and what kind of modifiers.
What people often don’t realize is that with only one modifier you can chance a lot just by playing with the angles and controlling the contrast/lightfall off. In fact placing a light closer or further away also makes a huge impact on the image look, add to this the option to feather a light source (using the sides of the light) and you know that there is a lot possible with one modifier and light.
It gets even more interesting when you are combining two strobes and for example add a gel to one of them.
During the workshop this weekend I made a setup like this with our model Lennaa and decided it would be a cool thing to share on the blog.
I started out with one strobe with a red gel.
To get a bit more “punch” in the image I added another strobe without gel under the same angle to mix the two.
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