Happy New Year and welcome to 2021, I truly hope for a a better world this year. However I still have a few photos to share from 2020… when being creative and making pictures was so important.
Josh contacted me to see if we could arrange a shoot while he was in the area for a few days doing a number of photoshoots. Given Josh’s physique I selected a location that would be easy for him to find, and hoped the weather would be not too cold, it was October after all.
- EOS R6
- EF 135mm f/2L USM
- 1/160s, f/2, ISO 160
The sun was getting low in the sky, so we started at the distant end of the tunnel, making use of it’s dark, concrete as the background and the contrasty low sunlight as a main light for Josh.
- EOS R6
- EF 135mm f/2L USM
- 1/160s, f/2, ISO 100
When Josh started to pose making use of the very solid handrail I took a few shots, but when I got to processing them this one seemed to suit being turned 90 degrees clockwise. I titled it “Time to turn this world around”, since so much of 2020 has been changed from the norm.
- EOS R6
- EF 85mm f/1.8 USM
- 1/200s, f/2, ISO 640
Josh’s travelling prop store – his car – included a baseball bat and leather jacket so we worked with that too. Moving further back in to the tunnel, the light fell, and sunlight alone was not enough. Time for a little Speedlite flash, here it’s providing the bright highlight on the side of his face, arm, jacket. If you wanted a shot with menace, we had it.
- EOS R6
- EF 85mm f/1.8 USM
- 1/250s, f/2, ISO 400
As the sun set the location got colder, and darker, but not phased Josh wanted some shots to show his physique too. For this I was now in need of Speedlite territory to give sharp definition. I recall saying to Josh at the time that it’s nice to use harder lights on shoots sometime and his physique surely was the right subject. I had two lights, one from the front and a second from the rear to give the rim light. Once challenge is that the rim light needs to be in manual and it can be hard to see if it’s too bright on the camera LCD. Also it increases the chances of purple fringes around the edge of your subject.
- EOS R6
- EF 85mm f/1.8 USM
- 1/250s, f/2, ISO 400
With this kind of light you need to be careful about adding the back light flash in the shot, as lens flare is almost a given. Though sometimes it’s not a bad thing.
- EOS R6
- EF 135mm f/2L USM
- 1/125s, f/2, ISO 1250
With the daylight almost gone, we took a couple more shots using small lights to give harder contrast. This particular location has lights in that automatically switch on when it gets dark. I wanted to emulate that kind of feel in my lighting and this was the result. I had to use higher ISO so that the background would be rendered as I wanted. Lower ISO would have simply made it too dark.
If you want to work with Josh, take a look at his profile on Purpleport.
I was using the EOS R6 for this shoot, and I finally found something that the camera struggles to focus on… faces in shade that are backlit. However in such situations switching eye AF off does help as the camera seems to detect head shapes. Changing face detection AF so that you can determine the initial AF point helps too.
See you tomorrow…