Ideas please

[SwissJon]

Ok.. Well Dougie and Al have lost me on the Acronyms I'm afraid.. I'm a complete novice when it comes to strobes. However that's the point of this exercise. I'm not interested in doing classical portraiture, but if I can develop some control with the lights, I'll be happy.

I'll be in London this coming weekend, think I'll get a couple of shoot through brollies (They're expensive here). My first experiences with flash on auto is rather disappointing so

I'll spend some time the next few evenings getting to know how to adjust things properly in manual. The strobist link was very useful, thank you.

I spoke to the bar owner where the Deck was, he wasn't so keen, I think he gets a lot of photographers there, and the sunset is unfortunately in the wrong place.

So I think I might bring her here and hae her on the left, filling in the negative space.



Somewhere I read that having the sunset behind a human subject is better than having it to one side.. I guess backlighting the subject would be good.. I'll obviously need some practice here.. Normally the sunsets I shoot use an exposure of around 20"-30", but that's with a 6 stop filter.. I think with the subject in the frame I'll avoid the filter and then use a fill in flash..

It looks like, on my camera, I can use anything up to a 2 secs shutter speed, and a different flash sync speed, which should make life easier. To get the background colours I'll shoot as if I were just shooting the landscape on its own, which leaves my camera on the tripod having composed the shot, then I'll just pose the model, and fart around with the lights, and make sure the flash speed and power works for the results I'm after.

Damn this is a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be. Now I just need to decipher Dougs acronyms..

[Doug Sundseth]

Sorry, CTO is "Color Temperature Orange" (or sometimes "Correct to Orange"). It's the standard filter used to make a flash approximately the same color temperature as tungsten light. You would do this to prevent weird color casts and multi colored shadows. A half-cut or quarter-cut CTO is a filter with the same hue as a CTO but lower density, so it corrects the light less. All of these are generically "warming filters".

If you use a CTO on the key light, then correct the white balance (WB) so the skin looks right, you'll also "correct" the sunset so it doesn't look so orange, which kind of defeats the purpose of sunset shooting.

That said, you probably also want the subject to fit in well with the ambient, so you want the skin to be a bit more orange than usual. If you use a low-density (half or quarter cut) CTO, you can keep the skin a bit orange without losing the orange of the background.

ps. If you want to go to 11, you can use a CTB ("Color Temperature Blue") filter on the flash, then "correct" the skin to slightly orange and you'll get a sunset that is preternaturally orange.

pps. IME = "In My Experience"

[autofocus]

Jon, you also could consider bouncing the flash off a white reflector to soften it a bit, but these are things you'd want to practice first, and not practice on her time...maybe find some fellow employee to follow you over there for a practice session before doing the real thing. Great idea though...

[SwissJon]

I don't think this will be my last attempt at this, just my first. Idoubt I'll be able to get it spot on first time, most likely I'll get flustered and forget how to operate the camera, or flash or something.. But that's why I'm hiring a model.. If it goes t**s up, so what? No big loss.. But if I don't try, I'll never learn.

I think the next few days are going to be spent looking at pictures of other peoples work and figuring out what works for me and what doesn't. I think if I diffuse the light enough, and make it weak enough, the colours will still seep through.. I don't mind her taking on an orange tone from the sun, in fact, I want her to.. The idea I have in my mind is merging of two genre, portraiture and Landscape, and for that to work, bot genre are going to have to step away from their classic nature.

One thing I think I'm going to try is with a wide open aperture, slow shutter (I'll probably need the ND filter on for this) and a really weak flash (1/64 or something), so that I can capture her in the foreground, and have small enough depth of field so that the landscape is blurred but I still get all that sumptuous colour and a hint of sunset behind her.. The huge depths of field in your classic landscape will blend her in, but it risks losing her, and your eye will not really know where to rest, between her and the backdrop.

LoL.. i do like setting myself challenges.. The date's been set for 10th October.. I hope there's some nice high cloud for the sunset to reflect off.