Hiding the sun... in a blue bikini

[sybren]

Last tuesday the lovely Lisanne, my girl Marit and I jumped into our shiny new car and drove to a nearby nature reserve. This was one of the photos we took.

She was bravely standing in the water, which had quite an agreeable temperature due to the hot day. Slippery as the rocks were, she didn't lose her balance. I was sitting on some dry rocks on the water's edge, which also supported my light stand.

To light this photo I used three lights. The main light was a Canon Speedlite 430EXII gelled with a 1/4 CTO to give her a slightly warmer skin tone, shooting through an umbrella at camera left at 1/2 power. Another Speedlite 430EX at 1/8ish power provided light from camera right. This light was ball bungie'd to a wooden fence that was meant to keep the Scottish Highlanders from running off. The sunset at full power provided the third light from back camera left.

I set the shutter speed to 1/200 sec so that the ambient was as dark as possible - after all, I wanted to balance it with strobes and that is easiest at high shutter speeds. An aperture of f/5.6 ensured that Lisanne would be entirely in focus while providing a nice soft background. The lens used was Canon's EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM on a Canon EOS 350D body.

The strobes were all set to manual, and triggered using an on-camera 580EXII. I like working in remote manual mode, as it allows me to change the light's intensity from the master flash so that I don't have to run around between the different strobes.

The manual mode on both the flash and the camera's aperture gives me consistency between shots, and allows me to make the photo just as I want it to be. I find it much easier to understand manual mode than to figure out how some Japanese company thinks a camera should work.

To get her hand exactly over the sun was quite easy. I guided her to moving her hand roughly at the right spot and in the right orientation, then I moved myself so that it lined up with the sun.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. For more photos of our shoot, see the set Lisanne in Het Twiske. All of the photos used more or less the same lighting setup.

Cheers,
Sybren

[Ecirish]

I checked out the other images in your set and i have to say I like the other two of the girl in the water: They're nice and crisp. The image above to me looks like it was chroma keyed in, probably because of the front lighting with your flashes. Maybe that's just me, but it seems like a key.

[sybren]

I see what you mean.

There is one more photo in the shoot that isn't part of the Flickr set, but can be found in my portfolio

[sybren]

For all those people who liked Lisanne, after we're back from holiday we'll do another shoot. Keep your eyes on my blog and/or photostream.