Lisa’s location shoot

Met up with Lisa for a location portfolio shoot to get her some different images for her model book. Despite the forecast of rain and a cool wind, it turned out to be a hot sunny day – a little too bright for my tastes. High summer sun makes balancing the flashes with ambient very tricky, even more so if you want overpower the sun with the flash. It gets real hard due to the fact that digital is so receptive to light, much more so than film ever was, so high shutter speeds of 1/4000 or more make it hard to sync the flashes and shoot at wider apertures for controlling the DOF. Definately not a situation for the mamma’s boys out there who say they don’t use flash as “it kills the atmosphere”!

Let’s get a little more technical here, I’m using two off camera flash heads in manual mode and I have the camera in manual mode too for this kind of work – I want to tell the camera what to expose for, not the other way round. I’ve also got a third light for fill – the sun! Using the flashes as key light and the sun as fill gives me much more control over the lighting of the final images. The 300 f/2.8 also adds to the power of the images by really blowing the backgrounds and makes the subject pop just a little more. Here’s a few from two locations – a disused Methodists’ chapel and a scrapyard, the latter was an awesome location to shoot in and I will definately be using it again!

I’ll be running some street photography workshops later this year – add your name in the comment box for full details or check back regularly.