photo session: urban ballerina – Oktavia
Oktavia is the stunning model on the cover of my book on off-camera flash. We’ve intended to do another photo shoot ever since then, but busy schedules kept us from that until recently. A theme that Oktavia wanted to explore, was that of the Urban Ballerina. The idea with the urban ballerina is the contextual dissonance of having a graceful dancer in the middle of some urban setting. There’s no real meaning to it other than contrasting art & beauty against the harsher urban setting.
With this grand view of the GW bridge leading in to Manhattan, we had Oktavia pose on this narrow ledge. But we had to forego ballerina shoes since the ledge was just too precarious to have someone balance on the tips of her toes right there.
We were working in a shaded area compared to the background, so I had to use off-camera flash to light her. The lighting setup was simple. A speedlight in a softbox to the camera left, and a bare speedlight to the right. I flagged the speedlight on the right with a black foamie thing to minimize lens flare.
At the distance I placed the speedlights, I had both of them set to full manual output. This gave me:
1/250 @ f8 @ 200 ISO
Ideally, I would’ve liked more light on her from the softbox, since the background is slightly brighter than I would’ve liked. A larger lighting setup like a Profoto kit would’ve been better, or perhaps a dual (or even triple) speedlight setup with a softbox on camera left.
The Urban Ballerina is definitely a theme with an interesting premise, and one I’d like to explore more in future.
Post-processing was done with layered actions via the RadLab filters / actions palette. I used this Photoshop plugin recently with the vintage photo session as well.
You can order the RadLab or the Totally Rad action sets via this affiliate link:
the discount code 1086NEILVN will save you 15%
other articles featuring Oktavia:
- Photoshop tips – retouching for portraits
- sequence of photos – posing a model – Oktavia
Equipment used with this photo session:
Nikon D3; Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 AF-S (B&H)
(2x) Nikon SB-900 (B&H); (2x) Nikon SD-9 battery pack (B&H)
(3x) PocketWizard FlexTT5 transceiver (B&H)
PocketWizard AC3 Zone Controller (B&H)
Lastolite EZYBOX Softbox Kit (24″x24″) (B&H)
black foamie thing
(2x) Manfrotto 1004BAC light-stand (B&H)
photography books by Neil vN
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Hello Neil,
very good! this article very interesting ..
What are the flash settings ev …
Did you use manual flash?
Thanks good job
Edy
Comment by edy — September 13, 2011 @ 12:14 pm
Hello Neil,
sorry I did not read that right …
Manual flash at full power …. sorry again …
Edy
Comment by edy — September 13, 2011 @ 12:16 pm
Neil,
Have you tried the new auto “Hypersync” from Pocketwizard for their tt5 and tt1′s? Supposed to go above camera sync speed with full flash power. Just wondering how it might have worked in this session. I know you’ve blogged about the Pocketwizards so figured you might have tried them with the Hypersync enabled.
Ven
Comment by Ven — September 13, 2011 @ 9:40 pm
Hi
What is the effect of the bare lite? I cannot see it in the photo.
Comment by Jan — September 13, 2011 @ 10:02 pm
Ven, hyperSync only gets you a stop on crop cameras. On FF, good luck getting 1/3 stop. There is no subsitute for raw flash power.
Comment by Bobby — September 14, 2011 @ 10:19 am
Bobby,
Pocketwizard site tells a different story. Haven’t had a chance to check it out and haven’t really seen too much on the web. Dave Black’s photo on the Pocketwizard site tells the story … supposedly done with Hypersync and not High Speed Sync… very different approach.
Comment by Ven — September 14, 2011 @ 6:00 pm
HyperSync is different in relation to High Speed Sync of course but to what degree of benefit depends on a few things.
I won’t even pretend to know about it in it’s entirety but here are some links for you guys to look at.
http://wiki.pocketwizard.com/index.php?title=Understanding_HyperSync_and_High_Speed_Sync
http://wiki.pocketwizard.com/index.php?title=HyperSync
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-10057-11055-11056
Plenty of reading there.
Trev
Comment by Trev — September 14, 2011 @ 8:02 pm
Hi Neil, great spot and subject !
I wanted to come tu your workshop in Dublin, but finally could not attent it :( …
Tomorrow I have a shoot session was too short …
I have one litle suggestion, in your site and 2 great books that I purchased you give some informations about the shot and the setting, like FEC, apperture and speed but you don’t give info about the lense, why ?
I think it can be interesting, to know how far you were from the subject. For some reasons :
- power of light given by the flash
- Impact on the DOF
- Imagining the setup
Thanks Dany
Comment by Dany — September 17, 2011 @ 6:50 am