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Category Archives: Fashion
Overpowering Sunlight with Diffused Flash Tutorial
Overpowering Sunlight with diffused flash is about creating a lighting ratio. This is a a popular and easy technique for contemporary senior portraits, editorial portraits, and outdoor fashion photography. San Diego Fashion photographer Emily Soto provided us with another behind-the-scene video clip demonstrating her superb fashion style and diffused flash lighting technique.
Pay close attention to how Emily uses diffused lighting ratios and depth-of-field and focuses the lens on the subject, while blurring out the foreground and background. Try this technique for your next senior portrait or outdoor editorial portrait session….it is not just for fashion anymore!
This time we see Emily using a Mola Softlight Dish instead of a beauty dish for overpowering Sunlight with diffused flash. And from what I can tell, Emily is still using an Alien Bee monolight and Vagabond battery pack. While a beauty dish can offer a similar diffused flash light quality, the wavy curves and distinctive shape of the Mola dish lends a softer light quality. For those photographers already using a beauty dish, I suggest diffusing your dish further with a sheet of ripstop nylon. Just drape it over your beauty dish and secure it with a few $.49 clamps from the local HomeDepot. You may find white ripstop nylon at your local fabric store for about $8 per sq/yd…it’s very inexpensive folks!
Popularity: 21%
How to Build a Fashion Portfolio
Building a strong fashion portfolio is difficult, it takes time, patience and the commitment of a styling team. It is important to establish goals for each shoot and cast the correct model. Fashion is a team effort. We have to find resources for wardrobe and then decide on the poses that might work with each wardrobe item. Additionally, there are three main categories for fashion such as catalog, editorial, and high-fashion.
Popularity: 28%
Also posted in Tech Info
Tagged fashion lighting, fashion model, fashion photography, fashion portfolio, fashion workshop, thorsten ott, zeroplusplus, zeroplusplus video
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Overpowering the Sun Technique for Fashion and Portraits
Over-powering the Sun with flash creates stunning images for your fashion, portrait and wedding portfolio. In this article I will explain the concept behind the technique and how you can create images like this as well. Over-powering the Sun with flash is very simple and produces elegant images that will “wow” your fashion, portrait and wedding clients.
Overpowering the Sun by 1 stop
The tools required are a 160w/s or better monolight and a portable battery pack. If you subject is close to the flash, 160w/s is enough. However, when the Sun is very bright or at “high noon” or the flash is far away, then I would recommend a 320w/s flash unit. I can recall at least one instance where I used a 1000w/s monolight because the Sun was extremely bright at the beach…and the beauty dish was 12ft away from the model.
Popularity: 18%
Also posted in Portraits
Tagged Beauty dish, Catch light, Emily Soto, fashion lighting, Flash, flash sync, lighting ratio, monolight, Over-powering the Sun with flash, Portrait Lighting, Soft box
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The Nylon Panel Lighting Modifier History
Thank you for the great video tutorial compliment Simeon!
At first I was only going to write a reply, but after looking at the length of it, I realized that it was becoming more of a post than a reply, lol. Valters Preimanis of Photologs.net also had a question about the panels.
I first learned of the DIY Panel System after watching a Dean Collins video back in the winter semester of Brooks Institute of Photography in 1988. I constructed 4 panels and my lighting improved 1000% overnight. I still fondly recall my teachers and classmates looks of astonishment during Fashion Class critique. The all asked “how the hell did you light the model, the light, the shadows, and the skintones look amazing”. My teacher Harry Liles, a 30 year LA advertising photography veteran, was especially amused by my simple and inexpensive lighting setup. That single image earned me early access to the expensive Comet strobes that were only available to the upper classman at the school.
In those days, lower division classmen were only allowed to light with Mole-Richardson tungsten lights for the first 1.5 years. I hated those lights with a passion. Imagine yourself photographing people with a 4×5 view camera, tungsten lights, a 1/30th of a second shutter speed, changing 4×5 film holders and cocking the shutter, directing and posing models…..all while wearing heavy Kevlar gloves because the Tungsten lights were so damn hot. Sweat just dripped off my forehead because of the heat. AND all this time I was nervous as hell shooting agency models because I had no idea how to pose or direct. The models probably thought I was a Guy-With-Camera and horny, LOL.
Photographer/Instructor Extrodinare Harry Liles by Chris Orwig
Popularity: 34%
TCM Models Editorial Fashion Lighting Tutorial
In this editorial fashion lighting tutorial you will learn how to use the white satin panel. All the editorial fashion images in this article were created with a single white satin panel and a single monolight. I find that monolights rated at 400ws, or more, will work the best.
Seamless paper users take note: I shoot between f/2.8 and f/5.6 to avoid or minimize seeing the ugly seamless paper ripples in the background. A shallow depth-of-field will help blur the paper ripples. In the images below I shot on a painted cyc wall….but I still shoot near wide open to avoid seeing cyc wall blemishes.
Editorial fashion photography is my favorite fashion style since I can shoot whatever poses I like. Modeling agency’s also like editorial fashion as the images demonstrate that a model can move well. But it is not just about movement…the model must also have a believable expression and display confidence in the wardrobe.
The two models I photographed, Ellie and Cassland, are with TCM Models & Talent. They were both brand new to modeling at the time. The agency booker did warn them that I like difficult poses and they would be asked to “bust a move”.
Knowing beforehand that this was the second shoot for the two girls, I wanted to spend my time and energy on posing and great facial expressions. As it turned out, both Ellie and Cassland quickly adapted to the studio environment and crew. We ended up photographing some of my favorite editorial fashion images.
Ellie J photographed with the white satin panel
Popularity: 54%
Heffner Models Fashion Shoot with Satin Panel Lighting
The white satin and nylon panels are the best kept lighting secret in the fashion and glamour photography business. In this lighting tutorial, I will teach you how I use the white satin panel to create a low-key lighting fashion shoot. This fashion shoot is for two local designers, Madina Vadache and Robert Whaley Designs. The lighting setup works equally well for the creative editorial portrait photographer.
My designer friend Dr. Robert Whaley asked me to photography four of his designs. The models are from Heffner Model Management in Seattle. The first model, Elina Ivanova, was on ‘America’s Next Top Model’. These 5 images easily became a favorite on several photography websites. I was kinda dumb-founded by all the requests for the lighting diagrams, so here they are.
Elina Ivanova satin panel low-key fashion lighting
This is a very simple and basic low-key lighting setup. The white satin panel is on the right and the strobe head is placed fairly close to the fabric. Be careful to not catch the fabric on fire, modeling lights get REALLY HOT.
On my left side I placed a second 5′ x 8′ white satin panel to act as a fill-reflector. Dark dresses such as this dress need a bit of kicker fill. For a white wedding dress you may not even need a fill reflector.
As you will notice in the lighting diagram, the strobe head is placed directly to the side of the model….and she is facing towards the light.
Try experimenting by moving the strobe head to the left or right of the panel to create a Rembrandt (triangle of light below the eye socket). With this simple lighting setup I can create a side-light or a Rembrandt lighting pattern just by moving the strobe head a few feet across the white satin panel……in seconds…..and no need to re-meter the lights!
Contrast ratios are easily controlled by the second white satin panel to the camera left. Additionally, we can control the size of the light on the model by moving the right-side strobe head further or closer to the white satin panel. Try doing that with a softbox! Continue reading
Popularity: 58%
One Light Low Key Editorial Fashion Lighting
The classic one-light low-key editorial fashion or portrait image. This lighting tutorial discusses how I use a single monohead and a white satin panel for a low key lighting setup. Again, we don’t need to blast the model with 1000′s of watt seconds. A 400ws or better monolight will work just perfectly.
Try this low key lighting setup for your next portrait shoot as well. Everyone loves the low key portrait look, especially the magazines. If you still doubt me, please take a look at one of the greatest portrait photographers, Albert Watson…..see, told ya, lol.
The designer left it up to me as far as how I wanted to shoot this. The studio cyc wall was beginning to look a bit faded and needed a fresh coat of paint, perhaps a dark gray might look nice. I took a piece of “Thunder Gray” seamless paper to the local HomeDepot and asked the paint department to match it with their groovy paint color analyzer. $30 later, I had a few gallons of inexpensive matte finish “Thunder Gray”.
Popularity: 67%
Editorial and Lookbook Fashion Lighting
How to use the umbrella for editorial high-fashion photography. The umbrella is not dead and this fashion lighting tutorial is the proof. Later, we also demonstrate how to use a beauty dish/satin panel setup for beautiful lookbook fashion lighting.
Four days ago, last Monday, Tim and I photographed Madina Vadache’s Spring 2011 Collection. The week before, we all met and had a short production meeting. We discussed which model we would like to use as well as the shoot location and the overall look for the catalog or lookbook images.
Madina also wanted a few editorial fashion images for the “splash page” of her new website. For the editorial images, we decided to use the lobby area of her condo building. The lookbook setting would be a corner of her design studio, a modern looking window with white blinds.
We can only show a few images, as the collection has not been released for public viewing.
The lighting diagrams are listed below:
Fill & Backlight Umbrella Fashion Lighting Diagram
Popularity: 55%
Nylon Panel/Beauty Dish/Octabox Ring Light for Portraits
When we think of portrait lighting, the first lighting modifier that comes to mind is the softbox or octabox. While these two modifiers are very effective, Tim and I prefer to use variations of the octabox or perhaps the nylon panels.
The panels when used as we did in the video below, offer a very soft light quality for elderly subjects. Or, we may use the same panel setup for beauty lighting.
For the creative senior portrait, I might suggest the octabox ring light modification. This ring light modification looks great for fashion, musicians and editorial portraits as well.
Popularity: 49%
Also posted in Portraits
Tagged creative lighting, diy nylon panels, octabox, portrait lighting tutorial, ring light
3 Comments
DIY Nylon Panel & 2 Octabox Modifications
The Zeroplusplus Photography Blog is about creative lighting techniques for the frugal photographer. Frugal does not mean cheap lighting. Frugal means being resourceful with what you have to work with. Tim and I show you the lighting modifiers and techniques we use for our commercial projects. And we like to show lighting examples that we use everyday…modifiers and lighting not so obvious to the casual observer.
1) DIY Nylon Panel – soft and diffused lighting for $50
2) Bare Octabox – mimic the 10am or 2pm Sun
3) Grided Octabox w/ToughFrost Disc – removes the center hotspot
4) DIY Octabox Ring Light – ring light shadow without the harshness
Early on in our careers, Tim and I assisted many commercial photographers, and were very fortunate to learn a variety of lighting modifiers and lighting techniques. The “Creative Lighting for People Photography” video tutorial demonstrates the 50 most popular lighting techniques we use for our commercial photography.
Aimee - Octobox Ring-Light Modification
Melissa - Naked Octobox Modification
Aimee - Nylon Panel System
Melissa - Nylon Panel System
Popularity: 39%
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