Lighting Tutorial - Fortune Teller shoot

This is the first in what will hopefully be a long series of tutorials I’ll be posting on how I’ve achieved the effects I have in some of my shoots.  The subject for today is one of the more creative setups I’ve come up with.  It’s the kind of setup that you run over in your mind and are never sure if it’ll work until you give it a go…First up here are a couple of the shots I took with the setup:

Now there’s not as much photoshop done to these images as you might first think.  Just some local contrast adjustment and colour tweaking, that’s it.  The effect was achieved by the use of 3 strobes.  The first two were standard rim lights set up behind and to each side of the model to provide separation between her and the black background.  The third was the creative one, I actually had it shining up from the bottom through the crystal ball.

The setup was as follows:  I started with a small round glass table & used cloth to mask off around the edges and even most of the table top, just leaving a circle in the middle, the strobe was placed under the table and faced upward so that it would fire through that circle and not spill anywhere else.  I then got a large glass bowl and a drinking glass both of the same height & placed the drinking glass in the bowl and the crystal ball on the glass.  I then filled up the bowl with hot water and dropped some dry ice in the bowl of water for the smoke.  The result being that with the smoke flowing out of the bowl of water and the crystal ball being of the same height of the bowl that the ball appears to be floating on smoke, with light coming from underneath through the table, bowl, glass and finally crystal ball to illuminate the smoke & the models hands and face.

I wasn’t sure it would work before we tried it but couldn’t have been happier with the results.  Often when you try playing around with ideas like this (and even less adventurous) some little thing you never figured on ruins everything and you have to play around a lot to get something decent out of the setup.  This was one of the rare experiments that just WORKED, straight up.

Beck in the snow - 19th August 2008

When Beck contacted me a few weeks back to tell me she was going to be in NZ for a week and was keen to shoot I was dubious to say the least.  Thing is I’ve had a couple bad experiences with Beck pulling out on shoots we had organised previously, however she seemed very sincere in her desire to shoot & it’s always good to give people 2nd chances when you can.  Well she exceeded all expectations, it was a cold morning with temps hovering around -5 to -10c and I can hardly recall a single complaint out of her.  Last shot of this set isn’t how I like to depict women.  It’s a bit objectifying and I like to shoot naked girls without trying to demean them in any way, but it was just shot as a pisstake and I think it’s good for a laugh, I had to really work Mikey to get that exaggerated Macho look out of him :)

An afternoon with Soph - 15th June 2008

I always grab every oppurtunity I can to work with Soph and so when she was up in Brisbane recently for a few days of work I did just that.  We had some makeup artist issues with a late cancelation but Carla came to the party and all ended well.  After we finished up with the car shots we filled ourselves up with an awesome homecooked meal (thanks Anne!).  The goal for the evening then was just to fit in a bunch of different beauty looks in a fairly short shoot (about 3hrs from makeup start to last shot).

 Model : Soph
Make up : Carla

 

 

 

 

 

17th March 2007 Bart & Dee Photoshoot (part 1)

 Bit of a delayed posting this one but better late than never.  I’ve decided to start adding images and a bit of background info for model shoots to this blog, flesh it out a bit when I’m not travelling.

 First a word on the models, what a pair!  Bart has been at me for quite some time now (he says about 2 years and I’m not arguing with him) for us to do a shoot together and I’d previously had a very successful shoot with Dee & we were both keen to work together again.  So when the two decided to do a shoot together in Brisbane it worked out great for all of us. 

 Bart actually drove up from Armidale to fit in with the weekend I had off from Aerial shooting (which has since turned into 5 weeks off, but that’s another story) which was a mighty effort and about ties for the most effort a model has gone to to work with me for a tfp shoot!  The other contender would be Jacinta who flew up from Melbourne, sure she had further to go but a flight is a lot less pain than an all day drive.  Anyways, not only did Bart drive up from Armidale but he organised a collection of literally hundreds of inspiration shots.  To Dee I gave the task of hunting down a gym for the second half of the shoot which she completed successfully.  So all in all I had bugger all preparation (besides mental) to do for this shoot, the models did the lot!! Wish that happened more often I can tell you…

 On the day I think it’s safe to say that the three of us worked our asses off.  From waking at 2:00am to make it down to Byron for a sunrise we shot through to about 11am and then made our way leisurely back up to Brisbane, we ended up shooting at the gym until around 3am the next morning, so it was a 24+hr day.  Mighty effort!!

 These first shots are just from the beach section of the shoot, and just the handful I’ve managed to edit up so far, there are still many other winners in there.  I started off with a very simple lighting setup of only my metz 60 ct4 on a tripod, using manual exposure settings to get that nice dark background.  For those wanting a bit more info on this basically I put the flash in place, took a test shot with the models in their rough positions and then adjusted the aperture until I had the models exposed correctly, then adjusted shutter speed until I had the background exposed how I wanted it.  These shots took only a fairly small amount of post processing because the contrast ratio was already about what I wanted by being able to balance the flash with the ambient light.

However my Metz soon failed, as I was to work out when I got it home the plug on the sync cord had become faulty so my camera wasn’t able to relay the order to the camera to flash.  So we then had to settle for an even simpler lighting setup - that would be my old friend simple natural light.  We were lucky in that it was a very cloudy morning so for the most part we had a huge softbox in the sky to work with.  These shots typically took a little more post work as instead of flash I had to use photoshop techniques (mainly dodge & burn) to bring out what I wanted to be brought out.

Without any further ado let me introduce the models:

Bart - http://www.modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=184064

Dee - http://www.modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=385512

And on to the photos:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Singapore girl - 4th September 2007

You can take the girl out of the city…..