Creative and business resources for photographers – ProPhotoNut

The HBOS headquarters provided the glass fronted building, or did we, the tax payer? Anyway the 12 stops of contrast in the background scene was dropped to just 3 stops by the time it had been reflected. The aqua glass put the right finish on the shot as it is in the opposite colour spectrum to the fuchsia pink that Megan is wearing. I used a 200mm lens on my Canon 5D mk2 to capture this naturally lit frame. Manual exposure, ISO 200, f/4 at 1/125th second. The meter was showing a plus 1 exposure compensation in the viewfinder.

A single Speedlight was used as a key light and sunlight from behind Megan was the backlight for this first frame of the day. We explored the mechanisms of controlling the background exposure independently to the flash exposure.

A blast of wind and my tunnel lighting in a dark space gave me the ingredients for this high key study. Notice the delicate kick light glancing on Megan's nearside cheek. The benefit of shooting in the dark is the bright unsquinting eyes.

A big hair shot. The reflection in the brushed stainless steel column in front of Oceana night club on the water front added to Megan's curls. Getting the sight line right is important in a picture like this. I missed the shot here for that reason. Megan was looking slightly too far left for this picture as it gives her an inquisitive look. Too far to the right would have resulted in Megan having too much white in the eyes. It was less important that I get the shot than it was for the delegates to get the shot.

After lunch I did the cafe lighting demo using just what was there in the room.

All these pictures in this cafe set are lit with just 2 windows. Again, the low light level meant that Megan could open her eyes. Reflectors kill the bright eye look as it becomes hard to look towards a bright reflector and that is why I never use them.

This is the same light, position and exposure as the shot above. I took these frames at my favourite exposure setting of ISO 800, 1/60th second at f/4. I just came round further to the right to shoot into the backlight window. The flare was part of the picture design

Who'd have thought that this shot has Megan in the identical position and lighting as the two shots above? It just goes to show the relationships with light position and subject position plus the relationship with background and camera position. Same exposure as above.

Before we once again stepped outside into the wind and the sun I demonstrated how to pull in a reflection off a black surface.

A bit of good old flash and burn had us all filling up compact flash cards with test shot after test shot. We all got there in the end and a new picture style was within the comfort zone of the delegates.

A gust of wind and a kick back from on camera flash give this shot the magic touch.

Here is a behind the scenes shot of one of my many set ups. It shows my key and kick technique being used at a range of over 10m in bright sunlight. Even the pop up flash on a Nikon D300 coped with the range. Pocket Wizard TTL units are coming to provide the radio controlled option but for now the ST-E2 and the SU-800 do just fine.

And here is the lighting rig in use. All be it with Megan sat and not standing. By this time in the day every delegate had mastered how to control the ambient light level in the picture independently of the flash. With this kind of control it is easy to select the right kind of look for the picture from subtle to punchy.