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Lighting an on-location photo session – Home Free

September 9, 2016 Neil vN 10 Comments

Lighting an on-location photo session - Home Free

I had another opportunity to do promotional photos for Home Free, the A Capella group. Some of the previous photo shoot was described in this article - On-location lighting problem solving. This time we met at another location - a farm which also doubled up as a reception venue. This offered us some outdoor areas, as well as a more barn-like area. From the art director and manager's description of what they wanted, as well as photos of the location, I knew that if I flat-lit this with large light sources, it would lose some of the  Read more inside...

Photo shoot with Off-camera flash – Adapting to opportunity

June 19, 2016 Neil vN 15 Comments

Photo shoot with Off-camera flash - Adapting to opportunity

One of the fun elements of the Photo Walks in NYC, is looking for opportunity, and being ready for any serendipitous moments. We were photographing Claudia, using the Profoto B1 TTL flash (affiliate), and a 3' octa-box as our off-camera lighting setup. Of course, we could also shoot available light ... or sweeten it with a touch of off-camera flash. We have options in how we use light. It's all part of the adventure of looking for great photos. In this instance, there was this reflective metallic wall on three sides of  Read more inside...

Gear list – Starting out with off-camera flash

May 20, 2016 Neil vN 17 Comments

Gear list - Starting out with off-camera flash

You can get great lighting with just on-camera bounce flash when shooting indoors, as shown in this related article - Lighting with bounce flash. But at some point you might want more flexibility and consistency. Or you might run into problem scenarios with bounce flash, such as colored walls and ceilings. Or you might run into a situation where you can't use any bounce flash at all, and the available light isn't ideal. Then it is time to step it up with off-camera flash. Starting out with off-camera flash photography might seem  Read more inside...

Off-camera flash & projection effects

February 29, 2016 Neil vN 8 Comments

Off-camera flash & projection effects

The photo that I posted of my friend Christy, lit by the lights lights surrounding the mirrored dressing table, was a co-incidental part of the photo shoot in the studio. It was a spontaneous thing. But when we got together for this photo session, I had other ideas that I actually wanted to try - something more dramatic, and using a new image projection kit that uses a gobo and a fresnel lens to focus the effect. With a previous photo session with Jessica Joy, we had used the Light-Blaster to give an unexpected pattern to the background,  Read more inside...

Softboxes with speedlights

February 21, 2016 Neil vN 43 Comments

Softboxes with speedlights for on-location lighting

Off-camera flash is the easiest way to create dynamic lighting - and using a speedlight with a softbox, is on-location lighting at its most elegantly simple. For most of my on-location portraits, I like to travel (fairly) light, and my lighting of choice is a speedlight, wireless transmitters and a softbox. The softbox is either held up by a light-stand (which I weight down with my camera bag), or held up by an assistant (with the softbox on a monopod.) I like TTL flash - it often gets us there faster than manual flash. But for  Read more inside...

On-location photo session in New York – BTS video

October 2, 2015 Neil vN 23 Comments

On-location photo session in New York - BTS video

I met Marco when he attended one of my photography workshops - he is charismatic and with that photogenic ruggedness, I thought he'd be a great subject to photograph on location. He was visiting New York from Germany for a few days, and I asked if he would be up for a photo session. And here we are. With this photo session, I also wanted to try out something I saw Dani Diamond does - where he has an on-camera stabilized gimbal for his Go-Pro, to give a wider point of view from the photographer's perspective. A kind of  Read more inside...

When to use high speed flash sync (HSS)

September 12, 2015 Neil vN 11 Comments

When to use high speed flash sync (HSS)

Let's cut straight to it - there are only two reasons you would need to use high-speed flash sync: to have an appropriately shallow depth-of-field, to have a sufficiently high shutter speed to freeze action. That's it. Just those two things. When you need shallow DoF, or a faster shutter speed than max sync speed, then you go to high-speed flash sync. What HSS doesn't do - it doesn't allow you to overpower the sun. When you go to from normal flash mode (at or below max sync speed), into high-speed flash sync, then you lose  Read more inside...

recap: NYC photo walks – photography workshop

September 7, 2015 Neil vN 7 Comments

recap: NYC photo walks - photography workshop

A fun addition to the photography workshops that I present, are the occasional Photo Walk in NYC. We roam a small area in New York with a model, and look for interesting views and places as background. There's no lecture style seminar, but I am there to answer any questions about lighting, posing and photography in general. I want these events to be informative and fun ... and for you to get some stunning images. More details about the Photo Walks: We travel light - no need to bring flashed and light-stands and tripods. Just a camera  Read more inside...

How to position off-camera flash

July 28, 2015 Neil vN 4 Comments

How to position off-camera flash

How to position off-camera flash

One of the most frequent (but easily corrected) mistakes I see when photographers use off-camera flash, is that they didn't position the flash in relation to their subject. They simply place the flash to the side (and often at a too-extreme 90 degree angle from their own position), with the flash too low in height. Your subject's pose and their position most often dictates how you should place the flash. We perhaps instinctively expect a light source to come from above somewhere, because that is where the sun is, or the light is coming from a  Read more inside...

Off-camera flash: Rim-lighting and using flare

July 22, 2015 Neil vN 13 Comments

Off-camera flash: Rim-lighting and the intentional use of flare

For these promotional photos for aspiring model twins, Carina and Carolina, we went to a park. There are certain things I look for when working on an location, that I know will immediately give me a better chance at successful portraits.  My book, Lighting and Design for Portrait Photography, looks at exactly that thought-process throughout the 60 chapters in the book. The technique here should be quite obvious by now: A long lens (a 70-200 used closer to the longer end), compressing the perspective. Shooting  Read more inside...

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