Model Shoot Advice Needed

For anyone that cares, here is some iPhone pics of the room and outside of building ill be using, the walls are crazy so that can be a really bad thing or a good thing, idk. Sorry there are so many. The outside is def a rugged looking place which is why I chose it, I like that style.


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If you locate her in the "garage box" as in no.7.. you will get one of the most pleasing soft light. Also I like the tunnel like in no.4.. Good luck and ill be waiting for the results :)
 
Looks like a great space! I like the quasi-industrial exterior.

yeah I thought it was interesting, its actually a really cruddy gym to workout in and the town probably hates the outside.... great for me :D
 
If you aren't very experienced working with multiple lights it's probably good idea to keep lighting as simple as possible. Instead of wasting ton of your and her time while tuning up lights, you should concentrate on getting as many good shots as possible. It's a whole different ball game if you have a very specific photo in mind that requires multiple lighting, but usually one light will be just fine. Hair or rim light is not exactly needed for a good photo no matter what people say. It's icing on the cake if you know how to do it well, but that requires a lot of experience and practice.

If you want to play with light, I'd instead suggest shaping that one light in as many ways as you can. Make it soft, make it hard, put it far away from model in a dark room and shape it into a beam that lights a path through her. Use the mirror in the gym, play with the huge rubber wheel in one of those photos. You're using a 50mm, use the large aperture and don't shoot too close to her.

Focus on the interaction between you and her. Try to see how she is, give her advice on how to pose and if you can't come up with anything you need to read up on that. Once you have some safe photos to lean on you can go crazy with more artistic stuff and weird angles. That place looks like an excellent place to photograph in, interior and exterior. So you have red walls? Use it to your advantage. Make sure you know how she dresses up. Things like her clothing, haircut even earrings will have huge impact on the photo together with the surroundings.

Take someone with you if you feel comfortable with that. Have a person who can move your light around for you, it'll speed things up. Gives you better control how to position your light. Don't get hung up on lighting. You're there to photograph. Or if you're there just to practice make sure she knows it and is okay with it, that can be cool too. It can also make things more relaxed if neither of you is quite as worried about the result.
 
If you aren't very experienced working with multiple lights it's probably good idea to keep lighting as simple as possible. Instead of wasting ton of your and her time while tuning up lights, you should concentrate on getting as many good shots as possible. It's a whole different ball game if you have a very specific photo in mind that requires multiple lighting, but usually one light will be just fine. Hair or rim light is not exactly needed for a good photo no matter what people say. It's icing on the cake if you know how to do it well, but that requires a lot of experience and practice.

If you want to play with light, I'd instead suggest shaping that one light in as many ways as you can. Make it soft, make it hard, put it far away from model in a dark room and shape it into a beam that lights a path through her. Use the mirror in the gym, play with the huge rubber wheel in one of those photos. You're using a 50mm, use the large aperture and don't shoot too close to her.

Focus on the interaction between you and her. Try to see how she is, give her advice on how to pose and if you can't come up with anything you need to read up on that. Once you have some safe photos to lean on you can go crazy with more artistic stuff and weird angles. That place looks like an excellent place to photograph in, interior and exterior. So you have red walls? Use it to your advantage. Make sure you know how she dresses up. Things like her clothing, haircut even earrings will have huge impact on the photo together with the surroundings.

Take someone with you if you feel comfortable with that. Have a person who can move your light around for you, it'll speed things up. Gives you better control how to position your light. Don't get hung up on lighting. You're there to photograph. Or if you're there just to practice make sure she knows it and is okay with it, that can be cool too. It can also make things more relaxed if neither of you is quite as worried about the result.

I think this may be the best advice I have got on this forum, thanks man! (no offense Leek, yours is awesome too, and derrel... etc...)
 
Dude! The red wall and the yellow wall? And the mirror wall!!!! YESSSSSSS! Sweet! Those will ALL make some excellent backgrounds! The grungy exterior? THe doors with the porthole windows? All wayyyy cool! And it looks like the location will offer a bit of privacy as well.
 
Nathan, you are at the point where you have a million things going on around you and all of these ideas and tangents you can go off on. You see one thing and it sparks that "ah ha!" in your brain and that leads you to another idea.
It's a great place to be.
And it's a horrible place to be.
You are mixing up things and like in a chemistry lab if you mix them up and don't know how the things will interact you can get a BIG A$$ mess. We are back to that statement of 'you don't know what you don't know.'
Stick to the KISS theory. Keep It Simple Stupid. Don't go mixing up things that you don't understand yet for a shoot. If you want to mix them up by all means do it, but do it with your wife as your subject or with an inanimate object where the outcome isn't going to matter. For the sessions you are shooting don't do it until you know how.
I think we've discussed before that you have to learn the basics before you add flash. Flash changes the rules of the basics. You no longer worry about shutter speed and motion (to an extent), you now worry about balancing ambient light and flash... You still have to balance the aperture and focus, but you have to also balance it to the flash and controlling that via shutter. You can no longer shoot above 1/250 if you are using simple flash-but you can if you're using rear/second curtain synch. It changes everything. So, you master the basics, then you concentrate on mastering flash and learning to balance the two.
Take this in steps. You have gotten back to where you were at the very first on here. You wanted to do it all at once. You stopped and learned the basics and got much further. Don't let yourself slip back to that chaotic mess.

So... for this shoot keep it simple. Don't mix things. Toss the work light idea right out the window. Use what you know and maybe try out ONE thing, but don't mix all kinds of things. If you have an idea practice on your wife or a toy or whatever.
 
yes yes, I do plan to practice on my wife, thats why I am buying the single OCF now, weeks ahead of the shot. I actually found a friend that said she would be dedicated to being my practice subject since my wife is busy with the newborn!

thanks for the advice
 
Balancing ambient light and flash is not a big deal...in fact it's pretty SIMPLE, really. Flash can only be shot up to the normal synch speed of his camera...indoors, you can shoot flash-lighted pictures all day long at 1/160 second. Or 1/125 second. Or 1/60 second. In fact, the range of usable shutter speeds when shooting flash pictures is narrower than without flash...

When using a speedlight and an umbrella with a d-slr....balancing flash and daylight in portraiture and modeling work, indoors, or in the shade, or during the winter months, is almost automatic...in New Hampshire in November there will not be much bright sun...any f/stop you might wish to shoot at, from f/4 to f/11 with flash, is going to give a decent background rendering at any flash synch speed from 1/60 to 1/200 second...almost by default, the background rendering will be "workable" to "excellent". By default!

Shoot photo. Review photo. See if it works. If not, make a change. Review image. Make a change if needed. Once the right exposure has been found, within the NARROW RANGE of actual, real-world f/stop outputs and shutter speeds that a speedlight + umbrella actually CAN OUTPUT, then shoot the chit out of it...a speedlight is not like a 2,400 Watt-second studio pack with six flash head outlet options and 512 possible power combinations....a speedlight has a very narrow range of output power...and GASP!!!!! it actually meshes very well with "real-world cameras".

You will find that there are NOT that many variables when shooting flash-as-mainlight images in the late fall in a place like New Hampshire...and INSIDE of a building, or in the shaded side of one...the range of actual exposures is even smaller...this is NOT rocket science.
 
Balancing ambient light and flash is not a big deal...in fact it's pretty SIMPLE, really. Flash can only be shot up to the normal synch speed of his camera...indoors, you can shoot flash-lighted pictures all day long at 1/160 second. Or 1/125 second. Or 1/60 second. In fact, the range of usable shutter speeds when shooting flash pictures is narrower than without flash...

When using a speedlight and an umbrella with a d-slr....balancing flash and daylight in portraiture and modeling work, indoors, or in the shade, or during the winter months, is almost automatic...in New Hampshire in November there will not be much bright sun...any f/stop you might wish to shoot at, from f/4 to f/11 with flash, is going to give a decent background rendering at any flash synch speed from 1/60 to 1/200 second...almost by default, the background rendering will be "workable" to "excellent". By default!

Shoot photo. Review photo. See if it works. If not, make a change. Review image. Make a change if needed. Once the right exposure has been found, within the NARROW RANGE of actual, real-world f/stop outputs and shutter speeds that a speedlight + umbrella actually CAN OUTPUT, then shoot the chit out of it...a speedlight is not like a 2,400 Watt-second studio pack with six flash head outlet options and 512 possible power combinations....a speedlight has a very narrow range of output power...and GASP!!!!! it actually meshes very well with "real-world cameras".

You will find that there are NOT that many variables when shooting flash-as-mainlight images in the late fall in a place like New Hampshire...and INSIDE of a building, or in the shaded side of one...the range of actual exposures is even smaller...this is NOT rocket science.

That's exactly my point, Derrel. flash isn't complicated, but if you start to combine it with those halogen lights and a few LED's and all of this other stuff it's going to become really complicated and frustrating. Learn how the simplicity of flash works and use it. He's at that point now and SHOULD. But he's got all of these different ideas and other things that he's thinking about putting in there and it's going to make a hot mess. Which is a mess he probably should make, but never on any type of client shoot.
 
Yes, hence the main thrust of my advice: "Shoot photo. Review photo. See if it works. If not, make a change. Review image. Make a change if needed. Once the right exposure has been found, within the NARROW RANGE of actual, real-world f/stop outputs and shutter speeds that a speedlight + umbrella actually CAN OUTPUT, then shoot the chit out of it".
 
I agree, go with the single OCF and work with it. I got a few lights last year and though I had to use everyone of them at first and had my images coming out flat and boring. I realised after a bit that I needed to take a step back and just put one foot in front of the other before trying to run. I stepped back to a single light and started shooting and my photos improved a lot over what I was shooting at the time. now that I"m comfortable with that I have started adding in the second light scource and just slowly building up over time as I learn.
 

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