Tag Archives: shoot my shot

Lighting A Model With A $3 Torch

Introduction

I posted some photos on Facebook recently which went up completely unedited, just a couple hours after being taken, that were lit with a simple $3 torch. Most of the people that I’ve showed the photo don’t quite understand how you can get such great results with such basic gear, but I’m going to show you exactly how it’s done.

How It’s Done

This is actually a remarkably simple process that just requires a bit of patience and a few well charged camera batteries, if you’ve got them. Start of with the basics, and build up to further elements once you’ve gotten the hang of it. The first photo I’m going to show you used basic camera gear, although relied heavily on the tripod I was using. I had my tripod’s back leg stretched out to balance the camera which was pointing almost directly down to the ground, where my model was lying. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to pose your model, but the better the tripod you have, the easier it will be.

The particular torch that I was using played a very important role in the end result because, even though I had much more expensive and brighter torches, this gave me the effect I was looking for. Instead of using an LED torch, I used a basic torch which provided me with a tungsten light, which is much more natural, familiar, and warm. It was also a lot less bright which meant that I could take my time and paint with more ease, as well as using the edge of the light to create a softer effect.

Before I go any further, it’s important to note that the only light source in any of the photos in this post came from either the torch I was using, or the stars and moon in the night sky. No flashes or diffusers were used to create the effect, which means that you can reproduce it with even the most basic gear. Next up was the exposure, and this is entirely dependent on the brightness of the torch and length of exposure, so any information that I can give you, will likely change depending on your own techniques. The photo below was taking in manual of course, for 30 seconds, at f/10 and ISO 400. This was a good starting point as 30 seconds enough amount of time to paint the light.

I walked around the model on the ground, being careful to keep the angle of the light low so that I didn’t light up the grass, nor did I over expose the details on her face. The aim of this lighting technique was to make it look as if there was a sophisticated lighting set up at on each side, with shadows around her facial features. You’ll notice that even though it was a long exposure, there was no blurring in the details, and this is because the sensor sees the image as a blank canvas until you start laying down the light of the areas you want it to see. So long as the model kept the areas that I was painting still for a second or two, there were no problems.

Due to the light and technique used, the lighting was fairly soft, but with some shadows in places being a little bit too dark, such as on her chin. To counteract this effect, I used the same torch, but instead of using the bright beam, I used the light around the edge of torch. This meant that I was dealing with a lot less light, that could be used for a longer time, and add detail to places that I previously couldn’t. It was a little bit awkward to get the hang of, but with a longer exposure time, I was able to produce a similar effect. This time, my aperture and ISO remained constant, but my shutter speed was now a minute and 44 seconds. You’ll notice that the shadows are a lot softer as I was able to take the time and cover more area with my torch.

Taking it Further

Once you’ve mastered basic light painting with your model, you can start to add more elements to the photo that make it even more impressive. Exposing for a model is one thing, but exposure for a model and the sky at the same time is a lot more complicated, and twice as easy to get wrong. The trick behind finding the right exposure is to expose for the sky first and work from there, because then you’ll have the hardest part done, and you can focus on applying just the right amount of light to the model in the time you have available.

I knew that I was never going to be able to expose the sky the way I wanted to with an aperture as narrow as f/10, so the first thing I did was widen that to f/4.5, which would provide me with enough depth of field to capture the model. Then it was just a case of trial and error with exposure lengths, trying to find the perfect one, and around 1-2 minutes seemed to work well as I was able to capture some star trails too. Long exposures really start to drain your battery life so the longer it takes to find the exposure length, the less battery you’ll have left. I always carry a couple spares with me when possible, although all of these photos were done on the same one.

The photo below was taken at ISO320 for 69 seconds at f/4.5 and I was able to take my time and walk around the model shining the light on her, as well as behind her. Because the camera was much further away this time, you’ll notice that there is less shadows on her body because I couldn’t get too close, also, the ground if fairly well lit up. I like how this came out, but ultimately, the sky was a little bit too dark.

To improve the photo above, I nearly doubled the exposure time to 2 minutes and 8 seconds, so that the sky could exposure more and the moon could light up the grass. I also walked around very lightly painting the grass behind too. I was also carful not to over exposure the subject as some of the whites above appear to be too white. All of this resulted in the photo below, where you can make out the most important part of the photo much clearer – the face. The shadows on the legs and arms are much better too as I gave priority to the front of her body. With this sort of lighting, you can also experiment some more with the colour, so I turned down the saturation on the yellow channel, which made the photo look colder and more green.

Now that you know how it’s done, you can experiment with all sorts of lighting, in a variety of environments to come up with your own results. It’s not particularly hard to do, and a great way to spend an evening of your time.

What to Watch Out For

We’ve already been over some of them, such as battery life and moving subjects, but there’s a few more that you’ll want to be careful of when shooting this sort of shot. Firstly, you’ll want to think about what you want to include in the photo, and whether it will be adding to the result or not. Anything that you paint the light on, the camera will pick up, so you need to be extra careful as simple mistakes can waste a lot of time. For my original photo, the idea was to have a completely dark background so that it wasn’t obvious that she was lying on the grass. When you start to light up the grass, you start to lose this effect.

I also mapped out the areas that the camera could see with shoes and a wallet, that way I knew that I wouldn’t walk into the shot at any point. If you look at the photo below, you’ll notice quite clearly that the torch has lit up the top left of the photo, leaving some light graffiti. Also, you can see the leg of the tripod in the bottom right on the frame. Both of these can be removed quite easily in post, but it’s best to try and get it right the first time round.

Finally, you can walk around and light up the scene, but you need to be careful of reflecting light. Just because you’re pointing the torch forward, it doesn’t mean that that’s the only place that the light is going to be. You can clearly see me in the background as I try to paint light onto a golf bunker, shortly before the sprinkler came on and ruined the shot completely!

That’s all for now, I hope you’ve learned something, come over and say hi on Facebook when you get a chance. – Josh

How to Create Colorful Water Drop Photos

Introduction

In this tutorial I’m showing you how to create a cool effect of using waterdrops to magnify the objects beneath, creating a colorful water drop photo. There’s plenty of different ways that you can customise this to come up with your own original and creative results.

What You’ll Need

A bowl of coloured sweets or stones
A pane of glass (table, picture frame, etc.)
Water
Water dropper or sandwich bag with a golf tee
Flash (optional)

The Concept

OK, first thing’s first, I need to set up my glass above the coloured sweets and place some water drops on the glass. I was fortunate that I have a glass coffee table in my house that I could use, but if you’re struggling to find something to use, I recommend the glass from a large picture frame rested on some books or folders – it will do basically the same thing. I don’t have a water dropper so I used a sandwich bag with a small hole in the corner that I could drop the water out of. I thought that this would work fine, but it turns out that the shape of the water drop has a lot to do with the overall result. Here’s an image comparison of my first try at creating these waterdrops.After a little bit of research, I found a way to make a much more effective water dropper, using a golf tee. The idea is that you need to find a way of controlling the amount of water that you’re using and give it a path to form a droplet in. I widened the hole in my bag by pushing a golf tee through it and then widened the hole again to allow more water through. With a little bit of trial and error, I was able to make much more uniform water drops which reflected the shapes and colour of the sweets below, much more accurately.Once I had the droplets set up the way that I wanted them, I started to experiment with the focus. I knew the effect that I wanted to achieve was for the drop to act like little magnifying glasses, but it wasn’t always that easy. The autofocus on my camera would get confused about what I was trying to take a photo of and would, more often then not, fail and produce images like the one below, or photos of the sweets in the bowl. To counteract this, I could either try and use the focal lock, or switch to manual focus. I chose manual focus because the focal lock was stil unreliable and I could just start snapping away with manual focus and I was bound to get at least a few decent photos.Once I’d sorted out the focusing problem, it was time to play with the light and positioning of my sweets. As you can see from the photo above, you can see the shape of the bowl in the photo which wasn’t what I was looking for, so, I raised my bowl closer to the glass with the aid of some photo frames and a large book. Then, to make sure that I was only including the sweets in my background, I used the longest focal length available in my lens as longer focal lengths force the perspective of the scene to appear closer together, allowing less of the wider angles into the photo. Adding to this, I decided to experiment with lighting my waterdrops from the side with an off camera flash. This lightened the colours that appeared in my photo and ultimately resulted in some loss in the shape of the waterdrops, which wasn’t ideal. Believe it or not, I actually started with a flash before trying it without because this is one of the occasions where I thought it would work the best, but I was wrong. This is really a matter of taste though, you may in fact prefer it to the photo that I end up choosing as my final image. Having played around with my settings a little bit, I found that so long as the camera was steady and the shutter speed was long enough (1/200), the photos would come out fine. I did however want a strong contrast between the water drops and the sweets in the background so I chose a wide aperture of f/2.8 to maximise the background blur. I’ve mentioned it before, but the most important factor involved in taking good photos of these water drops was to take good care of their shape. To get the best results, I found that taking the camera a few inches further away from the glass, while still using the longest focal lengths, worked best. The photo below was shot without a flash.As you can see, the shape of the bokeh in the background is really quite nice, largly due to the wide open aperture, and the droplets were an excellent shape. The main problem is that it looks a little bit dull and includes too much space around the edges where my bowl wasn’t big enough to stretch. To come to my final image, I just needed to do a small amount of post production. Firstly, I cropped the image so that you can only really see the colour, and then I used the repair tool to fix a few blemishes which were scratches on the old coffee table. I boosted the exposure slightly, added a very small amount of contrast and raised the black point to make the colours appear richer. These were the only adjustments I made and even though it looks like I may have, I didn’t adjust the saturation at all. Here’s the final image.

If you like this sort of tutorial then I would encourage you to come and join the Facebook page where I regularly share these sorts of photos before I teach people how to create them themselves. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment either on here or at Facebook or Twitter and ask away. Enjoy - Josh.

How to Take Awesome Twilight Portraits

Introduction to Twilight Portaits

This post is all about showing you how to take great photos during twilight, in very low light. This may not sound particularly difficult, but I assure you that if you try to shoot in auto mode, or even a priority mode then you would massively struggle to produce the same results. It’s not hard when you know what you’re doing, and that’s exactly what I aim to achieve from this post.

Step 1 – Test Shot

When ever I’ve found a location that I want to use, I always take a test shot on a setting I think might work and go from there. A lot of the time when I’m in a lighting situation that’s changing or I’m not familiar with, these photos come out pretty poorly, particularly like below when I’ve not got a flash out yet. This test shot was not to see what the photo would look like if I didn’t use a flash, I knew I was going to have to use one, It was to test the exposure of the ambient light in the background.

When I take photos at night with models, I always want to include some ambient light in the background so that the photo is more interesting. After all, who says a pixel on the face is more important than on the background. The settings used for the photo below are ISO 1000, at f/2.8 for 1/30 of a second, which is about as short as I can hold the camera steady for at a 24mm focal length.

Step 2 – Flash

For the next step, I added a flash, and after a bit of fiddling around I found a setting I liked. The only problem was that the flash exposure was turned up 1 ev and the aperture was slightly narrower at f/4 with a shutter speed of 1/40, which was allowing less ambient light in. I liked how the light from the flash was looking, but it was clear that I was going to have to change some of the settings with the exposure.

To create this shot, I used a special diffuser, but it can be easily created with a regular flash and a cheap £4 diffuser. Before we go any further, it’s important that you make sure you set your flash to high speed sync, which allows it to work differently and at much higher shutter speeds. Without this setting on, my flash will only work to 1/250 of a second. My flash is also set up wirelessly and will require some sort or transmitter, and you can read all about that here.

Step 3 – Flash Diffusion

The reason I asked a model to come and take photos with me was because I wanted to test out my new beauty dish and grid cover. A beauty dish sends out indirect light which is bounced around the dish before illuminating the subject. The grid that goes in front takes this soft light and forces the light through the holes in the front into a straight line and over my subject. The result is this soft light which still allows the model to have natural shadows on her face and body. The end result in my final photo makes the light look as it it’s come from a long way away, from a much larger, yet soft light source, when all it really is a wireless flash and less than £100 worth of gear.

Step 4 – Exposure

To allow more light in, I kept my ISO on 1000, at f/2.8 for 1/30 of a second. Clearly, this allowed more light in than before, but because the photo was too dark, this made the grain much more noticeable. The thing about digital grain is that you’re left with uneven colour with an almost grey and red tinge to it. This is no good for the type of photo that I’m trying to achieve, which is supposed to be soft lighting, plenty of ambient light and plenty of clean, soft and sharp features on the model. To try to find a compromise between the flash light and the ambient light in step 2, I reduced the flash exposure down 2 stops to -1ev. This didn’t work quite as well as I had planned, but it’s all part of the process.

Step 5 – Exposure 2 & Background

As you can see, the grain in this photo is a world of difference to the photo above, and that’s because I changed my lens to a f/1.4 prime lens that allows 4 times more light into the lens when it’s set to its maximum aperture. This allowed me to lower my ISO to 640, and on top of that, I slowed my shutter speed down to 1/6. The reason I was able to get away with such a slow shutter speed was because the initial burst of flash was powerful enough to freeze most of the motion and any movement in the darkness struggled to shine through. You will notice however that there is a little bit of movement on the right side or the face, which I fixed by raising the shutter slightly in the next photo.

Step 6 – Positioning & Background

From examining my photo above, I decided that I wasn’t entirely happy with the lighting the background because the light all seemed to blur into one, so I rotated my model and my positioning to capture the lights that went along the pier. The same settings as before were applied, except I raised my ISO to 800 to account for my slightly higher shutter speed of 1/6 of a second. Even though this photo was shot at f/1.4, I was able to keep the photo looking sharp because I very carefully focused on the model eyes, which is where your eyes are drawn. The rest of the photo, particularly the skin looks very soft, because it is soft. This combination works really well at night as it produces a great effect, while allowing me all the light that I need to work with.

The final settings for this photo were ISO800, f/1.4 at 1/6 of a second with the flash power boosted to +1ev. If you would like to learn more about how I processed this exact photo, then I go into detail about it in this post here.

Easy Water Splash Photography Tutorial

Introduction

The idea behind this series of tutorials is to walk you through the steps a photographer takes to reach their final shot, and the thought process behind those steps. There's a long learning curve to taking a photo that you've never attempted before and this tutorial is all about helping you to cut out the time it takes to reach a shot you're happy with.

What You'll Need

A lens with a long focal length, preferably over 70mm.
An off camera flash.
A transmitter or sync cable for that flash (ideally).
A black or dark coloured board or background.
Some fairy lights, or other creative lighting.
A tripod for your camera, and preferably one for your flash if you have one spare.
A bowl of water and large amount of small objects to drop into it (I used 10p coins).

What To Look Out For

Water on the lens – keep a UV filter on it to protect the lens, and a microfiber cloth handy to clean it with.
Water on the camera – there won't be too much reaching your camera, but keep a towel handy to dry any incidental splashes. The seal on the camera should be enough to prevent damage.
Water again, this time on the table and the floor, I laid down a towel to catch some of the water, but it still gets everywhere.

EP Water Splash Bokeh 250711 7128 Easy Water Splash Photography Tutorial

The Set Up

Half of the work towards taking this shot is done during the set up, if you can get this right, it's just a game of trial and error and lots of photos after that. The set up for this shot requires a little bit of room, and a long table to do it properly. Place the black board at the end of the table with fairy lights draped over the top of them, and try to space them out so that they're not all bunched in one place.

Next, take a large bowl of water and place it about 2/5 of the way into the table, and place the camera tripod at the very beginning of the table. If you're using a wireless flash and have the ability to mount it on a separate tripod, place that tripod alongside the bowl of water, with the flash pointing down onto it. Here's a photo of the exact setup I used.Next, you're going to want to set up your flash to focus directly on your splash, rather than the splash and all the area surrounding it. To do this, you need to manually zoom on your flash, which is really easy to do and pretty self-explanatory if you can't find your manual. You may not have noticed the difference that this makes if you use your flash on your camera on auto mode, so here's a little example of the difference zooming makes. The photos below were set at these zooms, in this order: 14mm, 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 70mm, 80mm, 105mm.

You might look at my set up and think it looks a little bit too complicated, but it doesn't have to be that hard, particularly when it comes to finding somewhere for the flash. I wasted a fair bit of time on test shots that were lighting up my background too much, and that's because I wasn't actually firing that flash on any water, which absorbed the light, and caused the camera to meter accordingly. If you're firing test shots, make sure you're actually taking photos of water splashes, otherwise the results can be a bit misleading, like in the photo below.

My flash was set to 105mm and kept there for the entire duration of the shoot. It had to be set to 105 as I didn't want any ambient light to light up the background and ruin the photo I was going for. The only other thing I knew about the photo before I started shooting was that my aperture was going to have to be all the way open, and that's because of the bokeh effect produced at different apertures. If you're read my tutorial on bokeh, you'll know exactly what happens, but for the sake of this tutorial, I've included a little demonstration comparing the aperture wide open and the aperture stepped down 1 stop.

To make this colourful background as effective as possible, you need the aperture to be as wide as you can make it, which in my case was f/2.8, and have the background as far away as possible. Because I was using a 24-70mm lens, I was able to have my background quite far away, without losing any detail – this made the bokeh bigger and the change in perspective forced the background to still be exactly where I needed it.

The Shot

Ok, now that we've got everything set up, it's time to start experimenting and the first thing I did was start dropping coins into my bowl and setting off the camera to take the photos as fast as I could. Even though the camera was firing at over 6 frames per second, the height of the splashes were going out of the frame, so it was clear to begin with that I needed to change my orientation.buy viagra without prescription

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As I was adjusting my camera and reviewing my images, I noticed that the colours of the fairy lights looked a little bit dull, but at first I couldn't tell why. The problem lied mostly with the ISO of the camera, which was set to only ISO 400, and the shutter speed which was set at 1/400 of a second. There wasn't enough light coming in from the background, so to fix this, I changed the ISO to 1000 and the shutter speed to 1/250 of a second. Depending on your camera, you may not be able to have your shutter speed this high while using a flash and the way to fix this is to set your flash to high speed sync mode, which is done by pressing a button that looks like a lightning bolt with an 'h' beside it. The boost in ISO didn't create any more noticeable noise in the colours I was shooting, and 1/250 was fast enough to capture the movement without blurring.

Water splashed onto my camera at least 10 times when I was shooting, and it's really important to get that water off your lens as quickly as possible, not just so that you don't break it, but because of the difference it makes to the bokeh. Drops of water towards the center of the lens will appear as black marks on the bokeh in the background, which completely ruins the shot in my opinion.

The main reason for so much trial and error in this little photo shoot was because of the amount of the unpredictable direction of the water, which made it hard to focus on. I set my camera to manually focus on the centre of the bowl where I would aim to drop the coins, but often the water would go wherever it pleased. The main problem with this is that you're shooting with your aperture wide open, which invariably means a very shallow depth of field and any splashes that go off course too much are hard to make appear sharp. If you have a look at the photo below, you'll notice that the water was sharp in the middle of the photo, but goes out of focus towards the top and this is because the water is moving away from the camera. This looks a little unusual because the splash tower still appears straight, and that's because the long focal length compresses the photo making it appear closer together.

If you can't take your flash off your camera, you can still try this effect, with just as interesting results. For the photo below, I left my flash on my camera and bounced it towards the ceiling to light up the room a little bit. I really like the photo that it produced, and I was torn between deciding which lighting I preferred, but I think that the photos with the flash directly on it make it stand out much more. You may disagree though, have a go for yourself.

Once you've got all of these directions under control, it's a game of trial and error to create the best looking photo splash that you can, and I personally shot over 800 photos in an effort to create 2 or 3 really good photos, but in the modern world of digital cameras, this isn't a problem. Here's a couple of examples of some of the photos I took, but if you'd like to see more, check out our Facebook page. Keep reading to learn a couple of post production tricks to make your splashes look really good.

Post Production

I'm not really one for too much post production, but in a photo like this, I encourage it, as the photographic environment is foreign to most viewers. I only changed 2 settings on my photos, the first of which was the contrast, which I turned up to make the black a little darker and to hide any extra little splashes. The second thing I did was to turn up the saturation to make the colours richer and more interesting in the background. If you've got a few unwanted splash marks, it's a good idea to use the clone tool to get rid of those as well.

How to use Panning to Easily Capture Movement

Introduction to Panning

I was recently asked to do some photography for a new blog that’s starting and my first assignment is to take some photos of them Go-Karting for one of their first blog posts. This is actually a little bit more difficult then it sounds as the venue was indoors and the client made it very clear that he wanted to give the impression of speed in the photos. This post will show you the steps I took to get to my final photo.

How To Pan

The final photo was successful due to the panning effect I used, and this is all about tracking your moving subject with your camera at the same speed as the subject is moving, then taking a photo so that the subject remains relatively sharp and the background blurs. To create this effect, you need to set your shutter slow enough so that it captures the movement and will continue to focus between shots as you shoot in burst fire mode. The focus mode I used in my Canon camera is called AI Servo, and I believe the Nikon version is called AF-C, which stands for Auto Focus Continuous.

How I Got My Photo

Whenever I walk into a new venue, I like to take a few photos to see the sort of lighting I’m dealing with and how it looks through my camera. As i’d just walked in I had no idea where i’d take the photos and decided that this angle was as good as any to start off with, but as you’ll soon see, I didn’t stay here for too long. The initial setting I used were ISO 1600 for the low light, f/5 so the DoF wasn’t too shallow and 1/30 to prevent too much motion blur. Shooting in shutter speed priorty mode allowed me to turn up the exposure compensation 2/3 as well to compensate for the dark conditions. Shutter speed priority is the mode I used for all my photos in this post as it allowed me to prioritise over the amount of motion blur I wanted in a photo, which then allowed me to fine tune the panning effect created in the final photo. In my second photo, I doubled the shutter speed to 1/60, and that, combined with the fact that the racer had come round the corner very slow, resulted in the kart being almost frozen in the scene. It’s still a strong photo and I like the reflections and vertical lines, but it wasn’t what the client was looking for. The shutter speed was too fast for shooting in that direction.

Changing where I was pointing allowed me to capture more of the movement in my camera as the motion now went from side to side, rather then into the frame. The main problem I have with this photo was that the aperture was set to f/2.8 (part of the problem with shooting in a priority mode) and that was making my photo a little bit too soft for my liking. Another problem I have with it is that the second driver was too far behind him in the photo meaning that he was mostly just a blur, I decided that I needed to change my position.Having moved round the track a little bit, I noticed that the lighting was much better due to big windows behind me and that I could probably lower my ISO to 1000, which I did. I also lowered my shutter speed to 1/20 of a second to really capture the movement. I love this photo below but I was trying to include more then 1 racer and there was just a little too much movement in the kart for my liking. Having seen no noticeable difference in the quality of photo (largely due to the amount of blur), I decided to up my ISO speed back to 1600 to allow me to play around with my aperture a little bit more. For my final photo below, the camera was set to ISO 1600, f/4.5 at 1/20 of a second and I’ve done absolutely no post processing. Both subjects are relatively sharp and i’ve kept the left third of the frame clear to provide a sense of direction and speed. Overall, I was very happy with the photo and so was my client; here it is!

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

How I used Light Painting to Capture this Photo of a Model

In this new series entitled ‘Shoot My Shot’, I’m going to show you a photo that i’ve taken and the steps that I took to get there to help you understand how the Pro’s take their photos and to reassure you that we get just as many misses for just 1 hit!

What You’ll Need

A model – doesn’t have to be a pro, just a willing participant
A tripod to keep things steady
A shutter release cable to minimalise camera shake (optional)
A roundabout or another moving object
An external flash that you can fire at will

The Light Painting Concept

The concept for this photo was to make it appear as if the same girl was in multiple places in the same photo at the same time. I’m using a concept known as light painting that you can read more about my clicking on the link. Couple things to note before we get started; the model I used was an absolute pro, but I still had to be quick as it was freezing out and she as sitting on metal roundabout, also it’s dark out so it was hard to compose a shot with very little light. Before I show you where I started, have a look at my final image:

Below is my first image, and as you can see, there’s plenty wrong with it. For a start, the model is only in the photo twice and they completely overlap. Also, there’s too much dead space at the top of the photo and it’s slightly off center. The settings used for this photo were ISO 320, f/5.6 for 4 seconds. The first thing I noticed is that 4 seconds was nowhere near long enough to get the photo that I wanted, I increase that to 15 seconds for the rest of the photos. This will allow the model to appear more then twice in the photo and have the flash appear from more angles.

For my next shot, I used a longer shutter speed and that allowed me to move the model around the image more times without having to worry too much about the time. I also straightened up the image a bit and pointed the camera down slightly. Even with the longer shutter speed, I didn’t pay enough care and attention as to where exactly the model was positioned when I set off the flashes, and because I had the extra time, I ended up setting off too many flashes and that made the photo quite messy. For the rest of the photos, I decided to stick to just 3 carefully chosen positions. Another couple things I noticed are that I didn’t step far back enough when setting of the flashes and you can clearly see my foot on the left and also, the photo still is not quite symmetrical yet. Time to take another photo.

This third photo is certainly a step in the right direction, but with 3 main flaws, the most obvious of which is the red line running across the middle of the photo. This came from the light on my flash indicating that it was ready to set off another strobe of light, I need to keep this covered in future or it’ll ruin the shot. Secondly, and less noticeable to most, is that there’s still too much dead space at the top of the photo, I need to either zoom in or recompose the shot. Finally, the model simply doesn’t stand out enough, and this comes from there not being enough light in the photo; the best way to counter this is to set off more flashes for each position – previously it was only 1 or 2.

Finally I managed to frame the shot just how I wanted it in this photo and I did so by zooming in by 4mm in focal length (if you want to understand focal length better, click on that link). Now this is a lot better then before, the whole composition is a lot better and the positioning of the model is nearly perfect. The positioning of the model in the center still isn’t quite to my exacting standards and there’s still not enough light on the model in the 2 other positions so it’s time to go back and take one more shot.

This is much more like it. Whenever I start out with a photo, I like to try and picture the best result I could hope for in my head and this is basically it. Considering how the model is sitting, having her head off center really helps with the balance of the photo as her legs go off to the right of the frame, it also means that she’s not overlapping the other exposures of herself. In post production I slightly increased the exposure and did a tiny amount of cropping, just to satisfy my eyes, and i was done. Hope you like it!

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.