Creative Day – pictures and technique
November 19th, 2008
One light studio pictures started off the session.
Here are the pictures from Mondays shoot. It was a great opportunity for us all to have a bit of fun.
I worked with diffused shadows cast onto the grey studio wall. Abi our model was commissioned via Model Mayhem and together with the rest of our team we got to work on the monochrome pictures.
Style and sophistication took over for this shot. Sarah Li our stylist had sourced some great clothes including this corset. I set the picture style on my 5D to Monochrome but shot in RAW thus preserving the colour data whilst having a mono screen preview.
In this picture you can see the stand on the right that supports my Broncolor Mobil flash head with the 1m x 15cm soft box attached. I used the soft box in horizontal mode. In front of the flash is my Lastolite Scrim Jim. It was the Scrim Jim that created the 'windy' shadow effect. A small amount of contrast control was provided by the Lastolite Tri Flector on the left. The orange disc on the right is my 'UFO chair' I bought on Ebay 
We played with looks. This picture was lit with three Bowens flash heads. Two with honeycomb grid diffusers and one with a 6ft x 4ft softbox.
A similar lighting set up was used for this picture. I wanted an Ice blue statue effect and created it in Lightroom.
A golden glow and a shimmer off the background cloth. I stretched a gold fabric on the wall and cut the soft fill light to 16th power. Stuart Holmes calmed down the hair whilst Anna from Stuart's salon warmed up the make up.
I shot this with my infra red camera. I quite like the portraits I'm currently shooting on infra red and although the looks are still surprising me I'll get the measure of them soon.
The gold fabric is clearly seen in this shot. We created a complete set of gold images too.
Next it was off to the woods. The drizzle was gone but so too was the light. I took the final frames with my 2 head Bron kit. We nearly need torches to get out of the woods at the end of the session.
This was taken with a Fresnel lensed backlight and with a soft box key. Both heads were powered from my Bron Mobil pack. I set a ratio of 70/30 to the output.
Here is a picture showing the lighting rig. I used the Bron radio trigger system and it works very well in this simple set up. Both stands are rigged to over 10ft and on sloping ground. Solid, high stands are among of the most essential bits of kit when shooting flash on location.
'Vulnerability' - I used a small cluster of leaves on a twig to create some shadows in this shot. The blue tone was added for good measure.
So there it is. Mondays shoot laid bare. The aim of the shoot was simply to get together a few creatives and produce a collection of interesting pictures. We had a few laughs and it was a pleasure to shoot without any client requirements for a change. As always, comments and feedback are welcome.
3 Comments Add your own
1. Simon Price | November 19th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Hi Damien,
Nice photos…….are these the sort of setups you are planning to do on your lighting courses next week ?
Simon
2. Sean Gannon | November 19th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Great selection of images. Inspires me to improve!
Sean
http://www.energyphotographic.co.uk
3. damien | November 20th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Hi Simon,
We will be shooting with one light, working with shadows and moving on to more complicated set ups. Expect the shots to be very different from those above;-)
Damien
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