Creating a sunset

Who’s using Twitter? You’re not? Why not?

Ninety Percent of the shoots I do these days come via Twitter requests, this shoot with Gem was one of them.

We shot these photos at 3pm on a sunny day with very little cloud coverage. We used open shade to help us out as we were using Canon 580EX’s as our lights. Usually I wouldn’t be brave enough to try and use these tiny lights in these conditions but the day before the shoot I went to a workshop taught by David Honl and he was pretty clear in stating that small hotshoe flashes are his main on location lights and that they are plenty powerful if you use them in the right way.

This first shot, as always is a simple headshot. A single 580EX in a 60″ reflective umbrella. I always start with a few headshots, I find it eases me into the other shots I want to try without much stress on me or the subject.

Next up we did a simple 3/4 pose using the 60″ umbrella as the main light but this time we put a 580EX with a full cut of CTO on it behind and to the left of Gem to give us a little extra colour.

Finally I want to show two very similar shots, in this first shot we used a single light in pretty much the same way as we did for the headshot.

In this next shot we kept the main light in exactly the same position but we added a second light with a full cut of CTO behind the tree/bushes to mimic early evening light at 3:30pm. The lighting diagram for this shot can be found on my Lighting Diagrams page.

So that’s it. Lessons learned:

1) It’s not too hard to shoot in the middle of the day with small hotshoe flashes.
2) CTO helps you mimic late afternoon light.
3) Get on Twitter.
4) Follow me on Twitter.
5) Follow John on Twitter.

Finally, thanks to John for helping me and Gem for being such a good sport. We only had an hour to shoot and she was willing to climb over a small river and up the other side to take these shots. If you are looking for a constant source of entertainment be sure to follow her on Twitter!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 10:22 am and is filed under Blog, Portraits and tagged with Griffith Park, Headshot, Los Angeles, Portrait. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.