Generic Lighting – One Light Set - Alyssa

Last evening, I took Alyssa (on short notice) to do some shooting against the setting sun. The sky looked as if it were going to be just perfect. I put her in the truck and rolled out to the site. AAARGH. Forgot the camera. Back to the house. Grabbed the camera and some extra AA’s. Back out to the site.
Here is the setup. One Quantaray QDC 900-WA through a DIY Beauty Dish on a boom, camera right. The sun was setting directly behind her.

Technicals.

As soon as the sun set, I started shooting. I didn’t like the colors in the sky while the sun was still above the horizon. Camera settings were ISO 200, F8 at 1/500. Flash on ½ power. Shooting continued and I chimped about every 10th or 15th shot or so. When I noticed that the ambient was getting low, I bumped the ISO up to 400 and dropped the aperture to 5.6. Kept shooting and chimping keeping a close eye on the flash exposure. When I noticed that I was over exposing on the flash, I dropped the power down to 1/8 and kept shooting until I was satisfied. Total shooting time was about 40 minutes.

Observations:

It’s obvious that light levels at this time of day drop fast. I didn’t realize how fast until now. Shooting against dropping light levels and trying to keep an even ambient exposure is tricky. However, for the first time, I found myself not really thinking about the settings as much as just changing them to meet the current conditions. Could I have done something differently? Sure. But, I’m happy with my performance. I was able to concentrate on my model and her pose rather than stop and think about manual settings. Very liberating. Another bonus was nailing down the settings and being able to bang away with infrequent chimping.

Improvements:

1) I really wish I would have had another flash… It would have been really useful to place behind her to give a rimlight at the beginning of the shoot. I suppose I could have used the setting sun for that, but as previously mentioned, I didn’t like the light. It would have also come in handy for separation in the lower key shots.

2) I could have used a softbox instead of the beauty dish. The dish worked out great, however, I found myself wishing that I had a softer light available. This made itself evident in post production when I was painfully aware that the dish shows every imperfection.

3) I could have brought in more posing variety… Although I’m happy with the overall outcome of this shoot, looking back on it, I could have done a much better job posing.

Final Thoughts:

One of my best shoots to date. Not only because of the quality of images but because of the level of my confidence. I took 180 shots in 45 mins. Of those 180, 20 were test pops. I could easily eliminate 120 of those as bad (blinkers, wind blown hair, etc). I was left with 40 quality images of which Alyssa identified 31 as 3 stars or better. 22% success rate overall. 77.5% success rate after initial “weeding”.

Room for improvement for sure.

Thanks for looking, we'll do it again...  soon.

Cheers,
Steve