Photo 29.5: Post Runway Shoot

My previous entry was awesome (Jason Magbanua!! Hell yeah!!!), but I didn’t get to feature any lighting techniques at all… So when our company had a Fashion Show event, I brought my camera to work in case I would get a chance to take pictures. Too bad the event was too early for my shift so I didn’t get to take photos during the actual event.

I’ve actually already worked with one of the models before (Kristell Lim), so when she asked if I’d like to take some portraits after the show, I quickly agreed :)

This was an impromptu shoot in one of our conference rooms. I’m really pleased with the makeshift set-up that I came up with so I’ll take some time in explaining what I did :D

This is how the impromptu set-up looked like behind the camera. Not so glamorous, no? :D

The key light was my speedlight pointed at the wall and then gobo’d to keep the light from spilling into the subject. The makeshift gobo was a file binder :D Pointing the speedlight to the wall and using a gobo were very important in achieving this shot for these reasons:

1. How do you make light soft? By having a bigger light source. When the light bounced from the wall, the entire wall became illuminated and it became the huge light source. If I pointed the speedlight directly to the subject instead, then the size of the light source would have been limited to the surface area of the flash head, which is just roughly the size of a clenched fist and a lot smaller than the wall.
2. Gobos constrict the light and keep unwanted light from getting everywhere. Here are test shots I did without, and then with the gobo. Who would have thought that such a big difference can be achieved with a file binder and a book :D (Oh and thanks to Randell for helping me set-up, being the test subject, and for lending me his speedlight, which was used as the background light)

A second speedlight was pointed at the back to wash out the background and also serve as kicker light. It was also gobo’d with a black book.

Later on during the shoot, we had some trouble syncing the second speedlight. So I just turned it off and it became a 1-light set-up. So for some of the photos, there were 2 lights, and for the rest, there was only 1 light.

I asked the other models if they’d like to get their photos taken as well, and they agreed! So here are some of the other shots I did:

Kristell