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