richhinton

This was a remarkably fun shoot to do, not only because I made way too much frosting and ended up with the mother of all sugar rushes!

The model is Rebecca Fisher, makeup by Karla Powell, hair by Pui Yan Chik.

I’ve had a few people asking me about the lighting setup I used for this shoot, so I thought I’d post a lighting diagram.

Clamshell lighting from the front with two flashes at 1/4 power through 28″ white shoot through umbrellas and a bare flash directly behind the models head for rim light at 1/16 power.

A couple of weeks ago I did a shoot for Neil Hughes to help him promote his new entertainment agency.  There were some fantastic models there wearing Neils amazing costume creations, made up with vibrant makeup and body painting  by Neil and has brilliant creative team.

Here are my favouite shots:

Back in October a photographer friend of mine said that we could use the office he works in for a photoshoot on the weekend.   Well I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to do a shoot in modern offices in the Mailbox in Birmingham.  The idea of doing an Office Wars theme came to mind and I started to plan out different scenarios for comical office war based shots.

We arranged for 4 models to attend the shoot and last minute had 2 cancellations due to illness.  Laura and Sophie attended the shoot and really embraced the office wars theme.  We all had a lot of fun doing the shoot, however couldn’t do all of the shots that we had originally planned as they needed a male model.

After shooting the office wars themed shots we decided to do a couple of fashion shots and even carried on shooting back at the car park before leaving just before midnight.   All in all a great day.

And some behind the scenes shots:

I have been wanting to do a gold themed beauty shoot now for well over 6 months.   I bought the gold liquid makeup, diamontes and organza material off ebay ages ago and had just been waiting for the right model to do the shoot with.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the idea of a gold beauty shoot to Rebecca Fisher and she jumped at the chance.  I knew that she would be perfect for the shoot as she’s got a really beautiful face with striking features and killer cheek bones.   She’s also very confident with doing her own makeup and did a good job of applying the very awkward self adhesive diamontes.

The setup for the shots was quite simple, two bare flashes at 1/16th power behind and to either side of Rebecca, to create a lovely rim light and help to give a three dimensional look to her face.  The main fill light was provided by a small softbox with 1/8th power flash, camera right, in front and above Rebecca, with a silver reflector held under her face to provide fill under her chin.

It’s a pretty typical beauty setup but does produce great results.

For the second shot, we added the gold two tone organza material and used almost the same lighting setup, except removed the back left bare flash and the reflector fill.   Two completely different shots with the same makeup and only minor tweaks to the lighting setup.

I received an email out of the blue last month from Nigel Atherton, editor of What Digital Camera magazine, asking if he could use one of my images in a Flash Techniques supplement.   As you can imagine, I said yes and here’s the picture in the magazine.  November edition of What Digital Camera magazine.  

I’ve been a fan of stop motion videos for a long time now, there’s just some so magical about them. I’d been toying with the idea of creating a stop motion video of a fashion model posing, lit by the same flash lights that I use for fashion photographs. I took the plunge on Tuesday night and decided to have a go at creating a test video to try out the technique and it went very well. The shoot was located at the Civic Center multi story car park in Wolverhampton, with Rebecca Fisher as the model. We got some regular shots done first, then moved on to the stop motion trial.

After three initial trials to see if we’d got the lighting right and to get Rebecca used to moving a bit then hold for 5 seconds to give the flashes time to refresh fully, we managed to produce a half decent set of 250+ pictures which looked like they would produce the effect I was looking for.

I used Windows Movie Maker (free with XP service pack 2) to put the images into a movie sequence, then added credits and a music track over the top. The whole thing took about an hour to shoot (including the 3 trials) and then another hour in Windows Movie Maker as I hadn’t used it before.

I was amazed at how quickly Rebecca picked up posing for stop motion and will definitely have to create another video with her soon. I’d like to thank The Brokenmusicbox for giving me permission to use their amazing track Time

After chatting with Rebecca at a previous shoot I discovered that she would really like to do a shoot with her partially submerged in water and after discussing the idea further we decided to do a shoot at a lake in Cannock with Rebecca  standing half submerged in a red dress that she owns.

The idea was simple, yet it was one of the more tricky and also more fun shoots that I’ve done to date.

The lake we used was about a 15 minutes walk away from the car park, through pretty dense tree cover and over about 20 small bridges over brooks and streams.

The idea of placing flashes on light stands in the middle of a lake and having to keep wading out if I wanted to make adjustments didn’t appeal, so I enlisted the help of two Voice Activated Light Stands (VALS) in the form of Rebecca’s boyfriend and cousin.

The initial set up took a while as I got Rebecca and the VALS to walk around in the lake to find a section at the right depth.  Which in the end meant that Rebecca had to kneel down in some rather nasty mud and pebbles.   It was pretty hard going for the VALS too as the bottom of the lake wasn’t solid at all and if they stood still for more than about a minute they would sink into the mud!

After about 15/20  minutes trying to get the lighting levels and placement of the lights right we ended up getting some very good shots.  The only issue with the shots was that there were a lot of bubble on the surface of the water caused by getting the model and VALS churning up the water while trying to get in to the right position.  Roll your mouse over the first image to see before and after editing shots.

Here’s a setup shot to show the placement of the VALS and lights.  Both flashes were at 1/4 power.

One useful bit of advice I was given, which I’ll share with you is to take a bottle of fresh tap water with you if you want to get your models hair and face wet, as it’s not very nice for them to have to use stinky pond water!   It also cheers the bored VALS up when you ask them to pour a bottle of cold water over their cousins head.

Another downside of doing a photoshoot in a lake is the amount of mud at the bottom of it!

Back in April this year I did a photo shoot for Airy Fairy which is an alternative fashion shop, located in The Oasis in Birmingham.   The model for the shoot was Sofi (Model Mayhem #1093764) a confident young lady who has really funky blue/green hair.

Katie, the owner of Airy Fairy who had commissioned the shoot, wanted to get shots of some of the items she sells for use on the shops website.  She quickly styles Sofi in a very nice spotty corset, black and white strippey socks, blue frilly nickers and to top it off, gave her a pair of white fairy wings and a blue umbrella to use as props.

We had access to the staircases and corridors located behind the store in The Oasis and the brief that she wanted to get some edgy fashion shots.

On investigating the stairwell we found a section which had some graffiti on the walls which would add a little more visual impact to the images.

There wasn’t much space in the stairwell so I initially set up one flash at 1/4 power with a 32″ white shoot through brolly to camera left, but as this was quite close to the model, the light was falling off too quickly and her feet were not lit very well.  So I set up a second flash at 1/16 power bare and placed it on the floor below the other flash (actually on my camera bag so that it was just off the floor and didn’t light the floor too much as well) and pointed the second light at the models feet, to provide just enough subtle fill to make them stand out.

It was a fun shoot to do and ultimately the client was happy with the results and has used some of the images on her website.   Here are some of the final images.

Here’s the lighting setup I used for the majority of the shots:

This was my first shoot with Rebecca Fisher (MM#1163415) and I have to say that it was a pleasure working with her.  She’s very talented and can come up with an endless stream of poses without needing to be prompted which makes a big difference to the end result.   I would heartily recommend working with her, and as you’ll see from my future posts I’ve already booked and photographed her twice more since this shoot and each time she’s pulled off the most amazing poses with so much emotion behind those beautiful eyes and I’ve produced some of my favourite shots to date.

The original idea for the shoot was “Woodland Fashion” and with that concept in mind, I asked Rebecca if there are any suitable wooded locations near her house, as I live in a built up area.  As it turns out, where she lives is surrounded by wooded areas and she knew of a perfect place for the shoot.

I try to visualise the shots that I’d like to get before hand and in this case it was a wooded area, with light canopy cover, hence some natural light coming through the trees, with Rebecca in a fancy dress posing by one of the trees.   This all went out the window when we got to the location and while having a quick explore off the beaten track, found a beautiful location which was under dense tree canopy, little natural light, however the area was covered in lovely ivy.   Immediately I started to adjust the shots I had in my head to take the ivy into account.

Rebecca had bought a number of dresses with her and while looking through them, one jumped out as perfect for this shoot, it had a floral pattern, as you can see below, which complemented the ivy perfectly.

One of the trees had some ivy hanging down from a branch, which was perfect for Rebecca to pose with, draped around her.  However, there wasn’t quite enough ivy to get a good shot, so I improvised and pulled some loose strands down from another nearby tree and hung it from the tree we were working with.   There was also a certain amount of pruning to be done, to get rid of brown dead leaves and ones that were a bit tatty and unwanted.  It saves a lot of time in Photoshop cloning them out afterwards.

The shot you see above was a simple soft front key light and hard rear  rim light combination.  I used a wirelessly triggered bare flash behind and to camera right of the model as a rim light and a 32″ white shoot through in front and camera left, above the model as a soft key light.   I really like this light combination as it provides good sculptural light and by playing around with where you place the front key light you can get really varied results.

A good starting point is to set both flashes to 1/4 power as this means quite good refresh times, then set your camera to 1/250th shutter speed and f5.6 aperture.   This kills a lot if not all ambient light, and is a good safe setting for the flash power.  Then you can adjust your settings to taste.    It turned out that I had to turn up the power on the rim light for this shot as the flash was placed further away than normal due to uneven terrain.

While taking the shot above, I kept looking at the ivy all around us which was covering about 80% of the ground and thinking about how good it would look with Rebecca laying on the ivy.  We found a good evenly covered patch of ivy, did some test shots to make sure that I could light it correctly, then got Rebecca to lay down and spent about 5 minutes trying to get her hair to fan out nicely.  I’ve done a similar laying down shot before and kicked myself afterwards that I hadn’t done more with the models hair than leave it where it lay.   I find myself spending more time adjusting hair and removing unwanted strands from across faces and shoulders, as it’s a pain keep having to clone then out in Photoshop afterwards.

We experimented with a couple of different poses and initially started with only one flash at 1/4 power through a 32″ white shoot through brolly, but felt that the light fell off too quickly towards her feet, so I introduced a second flash and set it to 1/8 power through another 32″ white shoot through brolly, aimed at her feet to fill them in without introducing too much more light.  Check out the setup shot below to see where the lights were placed.

I did some extra post processing in Photoshop to boost the natural high and low lights in Rebecca’s hair and added to the eye makeup to really make it stand out.  Move your mouse over the image above to see the before and after versions.

Back in June I did a photoshoot at Dartex Coatings, a manufacturing company who make material which has special coatings, such as high visibility material, silver impregnated material which is sterile and much more.

The shots are going to be used on there new website and also in marketing brochures.   The marketing lady wanted to get a corporate portrait, in the same style as I had done before for another company (B&W  composite of key members of staff) and also some shots of the manufacturing process.

The corporate portrait was easy enough.  Individual shots taken against a black backdrop, from just above the knees up.  Simple lighting, fill from the front camera right, and rim light from the back camera left, with the same lighting for all five people.   Then using FluidMask I cut out the middle three people and composite them together in photoshop.   I’ll post a more detailed tutorial of how I did this soon.

The manufacturing shots were more tricky as the shop floor around the machinery was poorly lit and also had restricted access.  Also in certain areas you could not use electrical items anywhere near the equipment due to the use of highly flammable solvents!   This also included the use of battery powered flashes.  Thankfully the flashes can be cranked up to 1/2 or full power to help light the equipment from a distance away.

This was the shot where we couldn’t get the lights in close as the clear liquid you see pouring out is highly flammable and we’ve had to remove the cover plates which reduce the fumes so that we could get a clear shot.

The lighting was nice and simple for this shot.  I got the one of the guys who works there to hold a bare Nikon SB28 flash with radio trigger about 3m away from the machinery and above his head, pointing down towards the liquid outlet.  This flash was set to 1/2 power so that it would give a nice bright rim light to the edges of the machinery.   I also used another bare flash hand held and radio triggered, on axis to provide fill.  I was stood up a ladder about 4m away with a telephoto lens to get a nice angle for the shot.

As we’re working with live machinery which is well used, there is often a need to clean up the image in Photoshop to produce a more aesthetically pleasing image.  Move the mouse over the image above to see the before and after processing shots.

This shot is of one of the inspection staff checking the quality of a sample of material.  The brief was to get a QA shot of someone inspecting a sample of material, with the focus being more on the material than the inspector.

We decided on high visibility material as the inspection light box really lights up the high visibility material well and makes it stand out.   Then is was just a case of lighting the rest of the scene as when you expose for the light box, the rest of the shot is almost pitch black.

My first attempt at lighting this shot had the guy lit with a 32″ white shoot through umbrella from camera left, to simulate the light coming from the light box, however this lit him up too well and he became the main focus point in the image.   So the issue now became, how to make the guy stand out against the dark background wall.  So I decided to light the wall instead to separate the guy from it.

However, the inspection station is about 3 feet away from the wall and has limited space to get a light in there.   My first trial of pointing a flash directly at the wall from floor height produced unusual results and I wasn’t happy with the spill off of light.   After experimenting with different light placements, I ended up bouncing a bare flash off the control box you can see at the back attached to the light box, which produced a much more even light with nice even fall off.  What you can’s see is the marketing lady crouched down behind the control box pointing the flash at it and shielding her eyes from the reflected light.  I tried using a stand, but it was cramped behind there and it takes too much time keep getting down from my ladder and walking round to adjust the lights position, so a Voice Activated Light Stand (VALS) was a much better option.  But do keep in mind that there is only so long you can spend “getting the shot right” before the VALS gets a little grumpy.  

Again, as this is a working environment, you cannot always eliminate all clutter and unwanted items from the shot, so there’s often the need for some judicious cloning action afterwards to remove unwanted and distracting items from the shot.   Check out the before and after editing shots by moving the mouse over the image above.

Another handy tip I have learnt is to discuss how the customer plans to use the images before editing them.  As with the inspection image above, there was a lot of clutter in the top section of the original image, including wires, pipes and signs, which would have taken ages to completely clone out!  I managed to save myself a lot of time and effort by checking how this image was going to be used and in this case it was going to be cropped for use on the website.  So I simply cropped the image to size in Lightroom, then removed and clutter that was left in CS3.