Studio flash outdoors - at night! Okay so maybe it's been done before via an extension lead. However, Keith Robins Photography is adventurous enough to investigate the great outdoors as a backdrop and discovered that full length portraits do not need rolls of expensive background cloth / paper. Nor is there any need to flag any of the flash heads to prevent stray light illuminating those annoying creases which seem to occur in even the smoothest and blackest of background material.
In a few of the recent posts of YeoPhotoGroup, an off-shoot of Keith Robins Photography, you may have noticed us using a generator to power a pair of Elinchrom D-Lite 200's. Handling that heavy beast of a generator took two men to carry it plus two more to carry our camera gear and all the other boxes and bags of lights, stands, reflectors, modifiers, softboxes and assorted cables necessary to operate an outdoor studio.Eventually, in a rash spur of the moment decision, I splashed out on a caravan inverter plus a new 12 volt 45 amp battery for my works plumbing van meaning there is now a spare battery in fairly good nick going spare. We can now operate two powerful studio lights from a small two wheeled shopping trolley containing this make-shift 230volt power supply.
Elinchroms are renowned for their 0.7 second recycling time which allows you to capture that fleeting expression of relief just moments after the shutter has fired which is when some models appear to briefly relax during the often daunting task of posing for the camera. During this two hour bridal shoot the recycling time for our D-Lite 200's remained very close to manufacturers specs and never went once over two seconds. An additional benefit is that once the really short time the lights take to recycle, the drain on the battery drops to such a minimal amount that it would probably last a whole weekend before the old van battery needs recharging.
In the first image here, Hannah is sat on a plastic sheet to keep her dress clean. A softbox front left and quite close created a soft main light and another Elinchrom with an alloy reflector lit the bushes behind her. Grace joined Hannah for the second and third pictures and revealed the difference our lights made to the texture of their lovely dresses. A silvered sun shield from a car windscreen mounted on a framework of plumbers 15mm copper pipe helped illuminate the shadows on the right. (More details on this DIY gadget in a later post)Using 1/200th of a second shutter speed caused the background of Sydney Gardens in Yeovil to go black, while f11 at ISO 200 controlled the lights. All this was between 8pm and 9pm on 9th September, hence the lack of available light.
Our next challenge is to get a little more ambient light into the background, probably a seaside sunset along with a striking silhouette.
Then it'll be a portrait session with a firework display going on behind, okay so we could handle either of these tasks in Photoshop but where's the lighting challenge in that? We'll probably revert to our hotshoe flashguns for this one although I am very tempted by the much stronger Elinchroms which can handle a softbox or a large brolly without losing too much light.
