Hey photography friend! How is it going?

I am Michael Zelbel. I'm still here in Beijng.

Today is my last day. Tomorrow I will be flying back to Germany,

but today I still have one spontaneous shooting with a new model, Amelia,

she just signed up for the model forum three days ago and

I thought she got a wonderful face for a couple of portraits

and that's what we are going to shoot today: some crazy portraits.

It will be very interesting so keep on watching.

This lighting setup will be all about flexibility.

I didn't really plan the shooting, but I know that I just want to do some simple portrait.

But there are so many variations. I dont know the model.

I dont know whether face is better from this side or that side,

which means: Should have my main light coming from the right or from the left?

I don't know whether it's better to have her long black beautiful hair open

and probably place it in front of a black background or whether we should tie it up

and place her in front of a white background, we will try out and learn.

For that I need a really, really flexible setup.

And this is what I am going to do:

I will use two speedlights as my main light sources.

This is speed light A, and I will have the model sitting over here,

and I will have the speedlight a bit higher coming from this side. Like this.

Just above the table at a 45 degrees angle. That's speedlight A.

The same on the other side with speed light B.

The good thing with those speedlights is,

that I can control them from the camera or from the on-camera flash.

I can control which one of those is my main light.

I just have to dial one control and say the ratio is now 2:1,

so two times the amount of light from here and one time the amount from the left.

When I tell her to turn her nose to this side, then I just have to dial

two time the amount of light from here and one time the amount of filling light from over there,

In just on second I can change the position of my main light.

I will shoot from over there to over here.

I need to fill in from below, and for that I just put some white towel ontop of the table.

This will reflect a decent amount of light.

Voilà! Beauty light from all sides and nothing can go wrong.

ETTL - Even I cannot mess it up!

Good, now the background! Over here I have got windows.

I can let down the curtains and then it's a bright background, creamy white.

It's a really bright one, which would need some more light to appear pure white.

Or I want to have it black. Black is very simple.

I've got my big reflector.

I just put it over here, lean it against a chair,

and when I shout from over there, then now I have got a black background.

Since she has got black hair and probably I will have her wearing a black hat,

I will need some head light and for that I will use another little speed light.

I will hang it under the ceiling and zoom it to 105mm,

so it's emitting a very directed beam of light.

I will hang it this way around, right over here so that it will just hit her head over here.

In case I want to have the bright background,

I just have to remove this reflector, turn this speedlight around,

pull out the built in diffuser so that it zooms out to 14 mm.

Then it's emitting a very broad cone of light

to the whole window wall over there.

When I now shoot her against the light,

then this will be brightened by this speedlight.

It's set to group C, so I can control it from the camera.

To brighten up the wall I would probably dial to plus +1, overexpose the wall by one f-stop.

To have just a bit of delineation in the hair I would set it to -3,

to have just a little it of light over here.

It's just a matter of two seconds to change the setup.

Okay, now we can try out lots of things within a few minutes. Let's do so.

There you have it.

Just a little portrait shooting, but with quite some variation.

The speedlights, especially the ETTL element of the speedlights,

was quite helpful. It makes it a whole lot faster.

So I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you have fun with your shoots!

I hope to see you soon!

Until then, I wish you good light!

Bye bye