|
|
|
|
Creative Lighting
We use our mobile studio inside people's houses for family portraits or at an indoor venues for event portraits or perhaps for a civil wedding ceremony. With the mobile studio we can light to shoot high key and low key, augment available light both with or without a studio backdrop.
We also have off camera battery powered speedlights which we use for adding drama and punch for location shoots and product shoots.
This kiln at Bursledon Brickworks Museum was lit in moments with two racked-out off-camera speedlights held low to cast dramatic shadows and bring out the colours and contours of an otherwise dull looking subject.
This blacksmith at Bursledon Brickworks Museum was doing his stuff in the beautifully soft light of open shade. This would have been perfect a beauty portrait but it made our blacksmith look really dull. So I stopped down to darken the scene, gelled up an off-camera speedlight with the warm orange you might get from a fire and held our the speedlight to cast interesting shadows of the hammer and anvil.
When it came to shooting the blacksmith fashioning his work I wanted to show the movement of the hammer so I couldn't use flash. That got me back to the dull grey light of the open shade so I set the colour balance to tungsten to give me a more dramatic and metallic blue. All I had to do then was release the shutter on the hammer bounce with a slow enough shutter speed to show movement in the hammer and resulting sparks.
To get this lovely portrait of Mum and Baby, we used an off camera speedlite high and to camera left, shot through a tri-grip diffuser to make the light wrap round our subjects and then dragged the shutter to let the background live. We shot using flash white balance to allow the background to be warm from the tungsten lights.
This shot of a bride and groom leavin the church was only made possible by some off camera speedlite action. My assistant was inside the car on the passenger seat illuminating their faces with a speedlite triggered from a commander on my camera. I dragged the shutter to expose for the background 1 stop down to saturate the colours not lit by the speedlite.
This young couple's wedding schedule was so busy, the only time for a portrait session was after we had lost the lovely blue sky of the day and were left with a horridly boring grey evening sky. With very little light and a dull sky, we broke out the speedlights and used split colour balance to save the day. Shooting a speedlite into a gold reflector above and angled so it was feathered below the waist.
In lighting this speciality cake I wanted to try and portray a night-club type of scene. To do so I wanted to light the "stage" and "front of house" differently. For the stage lighting I used a racked out speedlight to camera right with white light at some distance from the cake to cast the harsh and defined shadows akin to a spotlight. I fine-gridded and gobo'ed the spot speedlight to reduce the light falling on the tables and chairs in front of house.
For the "front of house" lighting I wanted the opposite to the spotlight, soft and the colour of tungsten lights and candlelight. To camera left and gelled with a warm orange and held another speedlight on wide angle and gobo'ed so as not to spill warm light onto the stage area.
In lighting this speciality cake I wanted to create "sunrise over the kingdom". I gelled a speedlight with a warm sunlight orange and held it low to camera left and at some distance to create the strong shadows.
|
|
|