The above photo is one from a recent photo shoot with a great guy by the name of Cameron Lightfoot.
I’ve been meaning to post this series for a couple of weeks now but due to what I’m going to call a ‘computer glitch’ (the less said the better) I’ve had to wait until now.
Anyway I met up with Cameron in Costa Coffee, Beaconsfield where we had a chat for around half an hour or so before heading off. Naturally before we met up I’d done my usual ‘location scouting’ looking for a number of places where we could work.
We ended up photographing in 5 different locations so for the blog what I thought I’d do is to break down the shoot into sections and show you in a bit more detail what we did and how we did it…
Technique:
Lately I’ve gotten into placing objects between the flash and the person I’m photographing so as to cast shadows and consequently add a little more interest to the picture. When it comes to firing the flash through a wire fence as in this case though there are a couple of things you need to be aware of to get it right:
First off you need to use a hard light source which in my case was a Nikon SB800 with no diffuser attached. The reason for this is that the person being photographed is positioned very close to the fencing and to have a large light source would cause the shadow cast by the fence to be very soft indeed; so much so that it may not even show up. However, too hard a light source and the shadow cast from the fence is way too defined and just doesn’t look right.
To get just the right look that I was after I had the flash positioned approximately 1 metre back from the fence, zoomed to 50mm and with no diffuser fitted.
I’ve put together a short video showing how I edited the ‘out of camera’ image and ended up with the final version. The video runs at 2x speed so if you have any questions at all about what you see please feel free to post them in the comments section below:
To finish off here’s a couple more of the photographs taken using the same lighting set up; one of Cameron and one from an earlier shoot with Tom Colley:
Any thoughts / comments I’d love to ‘hear’ them so please feel free to make use of the comments section below.
Also if you’ve never tried this kind of thing before but now feel compelled to get out and give it a go, shout me a link if you post any of your results online; I’d love to see what you come up with.
Catch you soon for Part 2,
Enjoy
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by Glyn
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