Woodland theme and how to light.

metroman

metroman

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I have a theme to use this location and use all of the foliage and trees that are in the scene. The model will be placed in the clear area and I will photograph her from approximately 30 feet away. It will be late afternoon and in a couple of weeks, the light will be fairly low as there is a lot of trees preventing light getting into the little clearing. I want to give the model a warm glow as if the sun is setting so can you good people help me how to light the area, she will be wearing a white floaty dress. I have 3 SB-800's, stands and triggers, beauty dishes, Octabox and regular softboxes at my disposal.
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Start by thinking about where the sun will be and the time of day and what colour the sun will be (it changes colour dramatically). Will the sun be a backlight, a rimlight, creating a pool of warm keylight or a PITA

Some technical:
If you gel the flash warm and the sun is cool, then you'll adjust the WB of the sunlit scene and your flash lit will be too warm. So you need to work out where you need a global adjustment and where you need to adjust your flash. You can only do this in camera, so you need to be prepared for what you're faced with.

Then there's the contrast - the scene above would be wonderful to deal with, but a typical British day with a flat grey sky would look completely different (do you have a choice of dates pencilled in).
 
Thank you for starting this off Phil, the sun will be to the far right, just about where that outer tree is but I am NOT expecting sunlight so as you so eloquently put it a "PITA". One of my real concerns is how to hide any equipment that may be used, stands flashes etc. I'm no photoshop guru that can clone blend or whatever process is used.
 
If you Google "behind the scenes woodland photoshoot" there may be something of use amongst the results - several look promising from my quick search. BTS videos and stills can often explain light placement and how to hide the gear more easily than words.
 
metroman said:
...One of my real concerns is how to hide any equipment that may be used, stands flashes etc. I'm no photoshop guru that can clone blend or whatever process is used.
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It's easy, You shoot the scene without the gear in from the same spot, seriously takes 10 minutes to learn (I'm no photoshop guru)

But back to hiding it - Using the warm sun as a rimlight from camera right, keep your subject closer to the edge of the frame where you're lighting from.
What's tricky though (and why I'd advocate some PP) is that my default lighting pattern is 'short lighting' so my subject should be facing the light. and if the light is just out of frame, my subject is then looking out of frame. That's generally considered 'bad composition', so the compromise is to shoot a 'plate' image with no lighting gear for a simple composite.

The composite is as easy as opening both images as layers with the one with your gear in as the top layer, then simply erasing the gear and the original background from the 'plate' image is visible through the hole.

To make this easy: Shoot from a tripod, and shoot the plate at a variety of exposures so you have one to easily match your 'lit' photo.
 
metroman said:
Thank you for starting this off Phil, the sun will be to the far right, just about where that outer tree is but I am NOT expecting sunlight so as you so eloquently put it a "PITA". One of my real concerns is how to hide any equipment that may be used, stands flashes etc. I'm no photoshop guru that can clone blend or whatever process is used.
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Remember that at that time of day the light will be directional so you really should not have lights dotted all over the place. The normal trick is to take the images with the lights in and take a few without the lights in place so that they can be cloned out later

Mike
 
I'll try to be helpful, and other people will try too - but the reality is that nobody can offer any useful advice at this stage because nobody knows what you're trying to achieve.
But, I'll take a guess at it....
Woodland scene, white floaty dress - I'm guessing that you're going for an innocent, virginal look, and if so then that's a starting point, although nobody ever knows exactly how something should be lit until they actually do it, and the more experienced the photographer is, the more true that statement is.
Let's look at your equipment - it's totally inadequate if you want to control (rather than just add to) the light. If you want to control it, you probably need 1200Ws of lighting, not 300. You certainly won't be using your softboxes because if you do so, there will be virtually no light reaching your subject. Testing for yourself though is the only way of finding out whether I'm right or totally right on this:)

So, maybe your best bet is to use your flashguns behind the model, to backlight both her hair and her dress. That may work if it's dark enough. I wouldn't use your flashguns for anything else.
This leaves you with just ambient light on her face, you can't actually light it so why not do what Profoto do, and create the "lighting" in Photoshop and pretend that it's a real location photo? Dig at dishonest advertising aside, this is actually the best, and probably the only way of doing it given your resources.
 
I'm going to disagree with Garry (which I appreciate might mean I'm wrong).

A forest is a dark place even at noon. From the OP's description 'the sun will be to the far right' I'd guess morning or evening, where a flashgun in a softbox can add a lot of light - but it has to be close, and the OP will need to study PP to paint out those lights.
 
Phil V said:
I'm going to disagree with Garry (which I appreciate might mean I'm wrong).

A forest is a dark place even at noon. From the OP's description 'the sun will be to the far right' I'd guess morning or evening, where a flashgun in a softbox can add a lot of light - but it has to be close, and the OP will need to study PP to paint out those lights.
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You may be right and I may be wrong, I often am.
I've done quite a lot of this sort of thing, I happen to own quite a lot of woodland in North Yorkshire and I like to photograph in it. Some of the bits are really beautiful when the sun is in the right place.
But, we're not talking about lighting the model here, we're actually talking about lighting the whole scene, which is far more difficult in terms of both equipment and other resources.
Whether or not a hotshoe flashgun fitted with a softbox is capable of producing enough light for the model or not is neither here nor there, as it will need to light the whole scene, and it definately can't do that.
And, even if it could, the OP would need to clone out all of these bits of lighting.
And it's unecessary anyway, as strong directional sunlight will do a much better job in a woodland.
Which leaves us with just the model to worry about, which is why I suggest strong backlighting/rimlighting, and do a Profoto for the lighting on her face.
 
Garry Edwards said:
You may be right and I may be wrong, I often am.
I've done quite a lot of this sort of thing, I happen to own quite a lot of woodland in North Yorkshire and I like to photograph in it. Some of the bits are really beautiful when the sun is in the right place.
But, we're not talking about lighting the model here, we're actually talking about lighting the whole scene, which is far more difficult in terms of both equipment and other resources.
Whether or not a hotshoe flashgun fitted with a softbox is capable of producing enough light for the model or not is neither here nor there, as it will need to light the whole scene, and it definately can't do that.
And, even if it could, the OP would need to clone out all of these bits of lighting.
And it's unecessary anyway, as strong directional sunlight will do a much better job in a woodland.
Which leaves us with just the model to worry about, which is why I suggest strong backlighting/rimlighting, and do a Profoto for the lighting on her face.
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I'd assumed (we all know the danger of that) from the OP's question that the woodland would be lit by the ambient and that he wanted to light the model to suit.
 
As whats been said above until you get there you're not going to know what settings to use, however you can plan the look you want.

I did a impromptu thing last year with a friend's daughter:
I had a Godox V860 in a softbox camera left and a Yongnou 460ii gel'd behind her, the softbox was about 1.5mts away and the rear flash 2-3 mts away this was taken at around 1030.

Ella Wooded Shoot-3 by Alan Cook, on Flickr

So have an idea of the kind of look you want and how you can achieve it but be prepared for things to change, and have fun
 
Garry Edwards said:
....we're actually talking about lighting the whole scene, which is far more difficult in terms of both equipment and other resources.
Whether or not a hotshoe flashgun fitted with a softbox is capable of producing enough light for the model or not is neither here nor there, as it will need to light the whole scene, and it definately can't do that.
And, even if it could, the OP would need to clone out all of these bits of lighting.
And it's unecessary anyway, as strong directional sunlight will do a much better job in a woodland.
Which leaves us with just the model to worry about, which is why I suggest strong backlighting/rimlighting, and do a Profoto for the lighting on her face.
Click to expand...

Thank you everyone, lots to think about here, @Gary, I think there may be enough ambient light for the scene as a whole, it was lighting her up to stand out from the greens in the scene that I want to do and your suggestion of back-lighting sounds a very good option. I think I'll do a dummy run and even include the equipment to try out some of the composite ideas as Phil suggested.
 
Depending on the model and effect you're after you could try a high intensity reflector - something like the Elinchrom Maxilite. I'm pretty sure Lencarta etc sell an S fit variant. It's not flattering but it throws light a long way and is certainly dramatic. You'd need something much more powerful than a speedlite though.
 
juggler said:
Depending on the model and effect you're after you could try a high intensity reflector - something like the Elinchrom Maxilite. I'm pretty sure Lencarta etc sell an S fit variant. It's not flattering but it throws light a long way and is certainly dramatic. You'd need something much more powerful than a speedlite though.
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We do, it's this one, but even though it produces several times more effective flash energy than a standard reflector, it only comes into its own with a portable flash system. As for light quality, the importance of this is usually overstated when shooting outdoors with hotshoe flashguns, simply because they don't have enough power to do anything other than add to the light that's already there. And a high intensity reflector, when used as a backlight, isn't supposed to produce gentle, soft light anyway.

In this video, we used a high intensity reflector to create a shaft of sunlight behind the model. This video also gives a pretty good indication of the amount of power actually needed when shooting outdoors in bright sunlight, which is what we had to contend with in the later parts of the shoot. OK, it wasn't actually woodland, but it wasn't a million miles away either
 
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