Outdoors Man

[Foga]

Here's a picture of a friend of mine, I took while on a mountain biking trip.


You can read more detailed information on the how to for this picture, here

Outdoors Man | Freddy Oropeza

[statichash]

Great shot and lighting...but how did you take it?

[kompressor]

I like it. Hard to ask for a better background. Can you share any EXIF data? Lens?

[LisaLove]

Outstanding! Can you please share some info on how you took it?

[Glayva]

Stunning Portrait - This shouts artistic quality and demonstrates the outstanding ability of a photographer who understands lighting.
For those of you who have not seen how Freddy created this, click on the title!!

Thanks for posting - amazing image

[ctcook]

Amazing portrait. Now answer this for us, how did you cary all that gear and ride a mountain bike?

[Foga]

I guess I should have explained better; the area where we took the picture, was next to our camp site, so we did pictures in between rides, while on a mountain biking trip.
I posted a link in my original post on how it was done, but I can see how it could be missed.
here's a copy of it.

The place was Dome Rock, in the Sequoia National Forest in California, is a huge rock formation that opens up to a great view of the valley below.

I like mixing natural light with strobes, I feel it can create a very dramatic or "moody" image while still having a very even and broad fill light for the subject, and a decent exposure for the environment.

For the picture above, I did a quick general reading of the environment, just using the built in meter on my camera. Once I had the exposure dialed in, I dropped it something like a stop and a half or two stops.

The next step was to light Chris, which I did by using an Alien bee 1600(I know, overkill) I though we would be shooting in broad daylight, and I was going to have to fight the sun, but the sun dipped below the mountain range and we were in shadows. The AB was shot through an 3 foot octabank from Creative Light, powered by a Vagabond II, and triggered by radio poppers Jrx Studio, which let's you control the power output through the transceiver sending the signal from the camera.

The Octabank was being hand held, so it could easily be moved back to adjust the intensity of the light hitting Chris, so at this point I had at least 2 options for controlling the power output.

We set the exposure for the AB roughly around the first reading I did of the environment, and started shooting. There were some tricky spots in the background where some mountain tops were still getting full sun, and some of the valley was in shadows, so the exposure got a bit tricky. I decided to compromise and try and find a happy medium between the clashing exposures, I tend to lean more towards the dark side of things, just personal preference.

Having the rest of the group around helping out and talking while we were shooting helped in getting some natural and relaxed frames of Chris and his baby blue's.