sactown024
No longer a newbie, moving up!
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2012
- Messages
- 658
- Reaction score
- 29
- Location
- New Hampshire
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos OK to edit
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Looks like a great space! I like the quasi-industrial exterior.
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.
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.