Sorry I haven’t been posting like I should! I’ve been swamped with work lately, and my blog as well as my website have been suffering from it. However, I still have a lot of new content to post on here from recent shoots and many more upcoming shoots in the month of July, so this blog should be caught up in no time! For this post, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about my experience with shooting in a studio vs. location. I’ve also included a diagram with my lighting setup for the photo that I used for any photographers reading this. One of the greatest tools that has helped me learned how to light has been by looking at other photographers’ lighting setups, so hopefully this will help someone out there.
This year I finally decided to change gears a bit and start shooting models in a studio instead of on-location. As a recent college grad, I can’t afford a studio of my own yet, so I’m thankful that {Andre Patton} has graciously allowed me to use his studio whenever I need to! It’s funny because I used to tell people all the time that I could never see myself working in a studio because it was so boring, yadda, yadda, yadda. But truthfully, I am way more relaxed in a studio atmosphere than I am on location. I don’t have to worry about location scouting, guerilla shooting vs. obtaining permits, losing daylight, finding a place for my model to change clothes, strong gusts of wind blowing my equipment over–none of that stuff! On the contrary, shooting in the studio presents other challenges that I previously never had to deal with being strictly a location shooter. When I shot on location, I normally only would run a one light setup, which made metering and controlling the light fairly easy. I would just meter for the ambient light and set my main light accordingly. Now I find myself going with no less than a two light setup in the studio, since there is hardly any ambient light to work with. During these past two months, I ended up purchasing two additional wireless receivers to experiment with running three and four light setups. It does offer more creativity for lighting, too, since one quick change in the position of your lights can totally alter the dynamics of an image. Also, shooting in the studio opened my eyes to the importance of a good MUA and stylist. For me, my style differs a bit when I am outdoors and have a cool location to work with. I tend to have a wide-angle to medium telephoto lens on my camera to include as much of that backdrop as possible to set the mood for the photo. So this type of shooting is much more forgiving with makeup due to the fact that the model is further away in the frame and is also slightly competing with the background for the viewer’s attention. With a plain colored background in the studio, all of the attention is focused on the model, and his/her face along with the clothing is the focal point. I also use my 70-200mm f/2.8L lens 90% of the time, which means tighter cropping, so bad makeup and poor styling would really kill the image and make me spend hours upon hours doing unnecessary retouching. On my most recent shoot, I worked with a MUA and stylist, and it was one of the greatest feelings collaborating with other creatives to produce amazing results. I will post images from that shoot later on this week, so stay tuned.
Right now, here are a couple of images from a shoot with Sonya I took about a month ago. She wanted the light fall off to be very dramatic for this shoot, so I purchased a 30° gridspot for my beauty dish to control the light. This is a really simple two-light setup. Beauty dish as the main/key light and a small softbox for a rim/hair light. We also had the wind machine going to add some motion. That’s it! It’s a very simple setup, but it can produce some great results.
Equipment: Alien Bees B800, B400, 5D, 70-200mm f/2.8L
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