I have been watching a lot videos of on location photo shoots lately and it motivated me to shoot one soon, even though its darn freakin' cold outside. So last Sunday, I asked my friend and fellow photographer, Dominic if he wants to do a photo shoot with her lovely daughter, Lauren. It is short noticed and not planned but I want to see what we can produce given that time. Both of them agreed on the plan so I went to their place to pick them up.Dominic and I scouted for a good place to do the shoot and we both want it to be a nearby location. It just so happen that there is a wooden area, a couple of yards from their house, where a couple of concrete pipes with graffitis lying around. I thought that was a really good location for Lauren's shoot.
So off we went to the woods... I brought 2 speedlights on a lightstand, an umbrella and a DIY grid spot with me. I have no pocket wizards that day so I have to deal with the cactus triggers to fire my speedlights.
First we started off on using available light, a couple of shots worked but it's a little bit overcast that day so we moved on using the speedlights. The sun is out, so we improvised on some shots to make it look that we are shooting with the sun up high.
As you can see in the behind the scene shoots, the concrete pipes in the area has a lot of cool, colorful graffitis. We had Lauren go inside the pipes and shoot her from there, the graffitis made a really nice background for the pictures. We used a speedlight (Vivitar 285HV) with a DIY grid spot to light her face. We place another speedlight (Nikon Sb-26) outside the pipe on 1/16 power to emulate sunlight so it looks like there is a bit of ambient coming in and make the graffiti wall pop out. A couple of other pictures where shot using one speedlight on a shoot thru umbrella just to put in soft light at Lauren, enough to make her pop out of the background. An hour later we produced a couple of good picture of Lauren and its amazing one you can do during that time, and it was short noticed too. What more can we do in an organized and well planned photo shoot.
Here is a slideshow of the pictures we took that day. Thank you for our very lovely model Lauren for letting us do this shoot even if it was short notice.