In essence you don’t want a reflective background

But sometimes things go wrong, like with our red background.
When we told the intern to paint it we clearly said, non reflective paint, and somehow this translated to High Gloss…. don’t ask.

So we have one background that is now awesome to explain angle of incidence is angle of reflection, but als to use in a more creative way.

During the workshop “alternative light” I’m not using strobes, but mostly light sources that are not designed for photography. Think about chandeliers, light bulbs, Christmas lights etc.
For this setup however I’m using Nanlite led tubes.
You can control them from your phone to change the output and color, which makes using them creatively a lot of fun.
In this case the original idea was something else, and in all honesty I didn’t like the outcome. But as you know I always advise the attendees of the workshops to move around the model, and of the main reasons for this is of course to maximize the results. But in this case it actually gave me at least one image of this setup that I really liked. Otherwise I would have no photos to give my model. So always try different angles before giving up.

A lower angle and using the material in the front out of  focus to lead the viewer to the face of the model combined with the reflections and color scheme somehow worked out for me.

So todays tip

Even when you are about to give up, always try some different angles, switch from 70mm to 24mm, include the lights/reflections or take them out.
But I’m 100% confident that when you train yourself like this with proper setups, you can manage to pull something out of a disaster of a set 😀

Workshops

Want to learn everything about light control?
Want to visit a workshop where it’s not just shooting a model with a fixed lighting setup, but see how the setup is build and adjusted to the taste of the group?
And of course learn how to work with poses, backgrounds, small sets, styling, retouching and a lot more…..

If this all sounds awesome, visit fotografie-workshops.nl and book your workshop.
If you don’t speak Dutch, no problem, let us know a few weeks in advance and we can switch the workshop to English.
Not possible to travel to The Netherlands?
We got you covered with our 1:1 online workshop.
We have a full streaming setup in our studio. 4 detail cameras and of course the retouching software so you can see every detail and of course ask questions during the day. Plus you get all the RAW files after the workshop.