location portraits Untitled

thanks for looking

Lovely subject, of course. I'm finding the crop to be a little distracting, though. Her feet are close to out of the frame, but she's got lots of room overhead, and a distracting amount of detail coming in from the left. Perhaps a wider aperture to throw some of the background more out of focus, and then just a slight composition change to make it all about here, and less about the place.

Matt,

First, thanks for taking the time to comment. I have revised the cropping in an effort to generate something that might be more appealing to you.

 

A technical point is I was shooting into a very bright background and need to add some light back to her otherwise she would have been very dark. My settings were ISO 200, f/5.0, 1/250 at 70mm with my 70-200 f 2.8 VR lens. D700 body. I used by SB-900 on body set at 0 EV TTL to add light to her right side and a bit of reflector to her left front side to get enough light on her to balance with the light of the background. You can tell how strongly backlite she was by the shadows from her legs! I guess I could have tried to decrease my ISO to 100 and bumped the aperture down one stop to f 3.5. At f 5.0, my estimated depth of field went from 3.14 feet in front of her and 4.57 feet behind her. At f 3.5, my estimated depth of field went from 2.32 feet in front of her and 3.03 feet behind her. Not sure whether the aperture change would have had a substantial visual effect on the background, perhaps a bit.

 

I think I was pretty much boxed in with my settings, but if others have ideas, I would love to learn them!!

 

And again, thanks for commenting. I really appreciate it. Steven

Hmm. That's a tough one! Two solutions come to mind. First, use a reflector, instead of the strobe. That way, you can stop worrying about the sync speed on the shutter, open that 70-200 up to f/2.8, and just shoot at 1/2000 or whatever it takes. If you're close enough, you can also use high speed synch - though your flash loses a lot of power, that way. If you have an assistant, a reflector is the magic solution.

 

OR, you could use a neutral density filter. Say, a three-stop filter. That way you could keep the shutter speed in synch with the flash at normal power, and still open up the lens wider without being overpowered by all of that light. Your flash output would need to to up, to compensate for the I'm-wearing-sunglasses effect of the ND filter, but it should be able to keep up.

 

Hard light like that is tricky, no question. Oh, and yeah - I like the new crop better!

I used a reflector to bring up her left side, but it left her right side a bit too dark. Having only one assistant with me, I decide to fill her right side with a bit of strobe.

 

I really like using reflectors in this situation, I agree, as they generally balance the back light well. I showed another picture earlier that I only used a reflector and it worked great.

 

The neutral density filter concept...I have to think about. It would think that a neutral density would reduce both strobe, reflector light to the same degree as the background light. If true, then the net gain would be minimal, unless I could really pump up the strobe. As good as the SB-900 is, I doubt if it would keep up. Need something stronger would be my guess. Having suggested it, I will see if I can do an experiment someday to see what would happen.

 

Again, I really appreciate your thoughts. Steven