Fashion and Beauty Photography Lighting Set-Ups

What have got us out here is a little bit different because I’m introducing artificial light. I’ve got some flashlight set up here which are powered from this battery pack. And these are kind of like studio flashlights but I have a much higher output than normal sort of small flashguns, and I’m going to shoot into the light so that my model backlit and I'm going to under expose the background. And, I'm going to do that intentionally because I'm going to expose the model correctly with the flashlights.

Now on my camera here, I have a transmitter. And this transmitter sends a radio signal to the receiver on the battery pack so that it triggers the lights for me exactly at the right moment. And to cut down the daylight, I’m using a neutral density filter to darken the sky down. I’ve also got to polarizing filter which will help saturate the colors and add a little bit contrast in there as well. Now on lighting setup, I’m using two large umbrellas and it’s quite windy here today so we got the assistance holding onto the lighting stands here.

Now, these are going to give us in between light, we’ve looked at hard light, we’ve looked at soft light, but this is going to give us somewhere in between because it’s not a huge light source but it’s not a small light source either and I'm going to light down this side of the model. And she’s going to be wearing a bright yellow dress which is going to contrast nicely against the sky.

Now, the key to this shot in the composition is the way that these stairs that are going to lead your eye into the shot and I’ve got these towers in the background and those are going to add a compositional element to the picture. And I'm going to use the sheens of light of the glass, the blue sky, the position of the model, and as I said, these leading lines of the stairs to draw your eye into the picture and keep your interest there. Now we’ve got to run some test first to get the right amount of flashlight into our main shot and to expose the model correctly. I’ve already run some tests on just a scene and got the correct exposure, underexposed so as soon as the model is ready, I'm going to get Ivory here and then we’re going to do some test on her.

And I’ve got to get you in the right position with these buildings and these stairs and everything. I’m going to mess around with that first. And then once we’re ready, with this wind that is good for me, with the dress in the wind, but it might be good as well if we add some motion of your arms going out or something, I don’t know, that you maybe sort of turn and it looks like that you’ve just turned to look on something so, we’ll see how that goes but let’s just bring you quite close to this edge here, just come for—no, no, stay on the top. That’s it, close to the edge there. Okay. Now that’s really looking good, just a question of where we try to put you. So what I what to do Ivory is just try you come closer to the edge—that’s it.

That’s it perfect. Excellent, Yup, Good, yeah good, excellent.

[Demonstration]

Great, perfect. Let’s just see what we can do just moving the body even like you just did then when you took a step here, that’s quite nice because at the back of the dress is flowing out behind, you see, when you took the step. So you kind of just did a step forwards and not move which is good.

Hang on a second, just do the step and then stop so I can see where—yeah, that’s it. I just want to see where the focus point goes, that’s it there. Okay good, right so let’s do that.

Good, that’s good. Okay.

[Demonstration]

Great work. Okay, that’s it well done. Thank you very much. Alright, you can have a break for a minute and then we’re going to figure out what we’re going to do in a different position. Okay, good stuff. Right, let’s pack this stuff up unfortunately. And then move on up there.

Okay we did a series of pictures there. It worked out fantastically. Great light, I used the fill-in flash. Composition worked really, really well, especially with these two tall buildings and these lines of steps and then the model worked great there—we’ve got her in the right position. Applied some of the rule of thirds but not all of the rule of thirds because as I said, we can break the rules, it’s just whatever feels good once you get more experience for your photography.

From my lighting point of view, flash in the daylight, it’s fantastic. It’s the best time to use flash is in the daylight. And when you shoot into the light, and you’ve got the shadow side, that’s the side you fill in with flash and that’s what looks like a really professional fashion shot.