How much can you do with one flash head?

Lots. Back in june, I scheduled an engagement shoot with my clients, at the location where the wedding would later take place. Hardly betting on the fact that daylight would be the same almost 5 months later, I still wanted to get a feel for the d-day location, as well as some of the key pre-wedding moments.

The rig – Easy does it.
For this shoot, I decided to tackle the big ol’ sunshine with nothing but a SB 800 and a shoot through umbrella. This was shot all in manual mode (of course) as I have trust issues with TTL and all such automated “think for me” out of the box solutions. I figured 2 pocketwizards would do the trick. so with 2 pw’s, a small light stand and off we went. Also, nothing a little high-speed sync, bending the limits of my flash sync speed into something usable.

The location: Bright sunny field with green green grass, bright blue sky and lots of light. Not one cloud that day. As I do favor overcast skies for a photoshoot, I was a little worried about ugly light, a.k.a strong shadows under the eyeballs and nostrils, creating such zombie like images.

Enough with the talking, here are some of the out-takes from the engagement shoot.

Most of the lighting setup involve a camera-left or camera-right, sometimes high angled flash, set to manual, most of the time 1/4 or 1/2 power, depending on the distance to subject. Then, playing with your aperture (I recommend shooting in Aperture priority in cases like this – subject isn’t moving, not very fast anyway, so focus your control on the depth of field and other more important details)

The sketches, based on what I can remember from those shots:

Sun at that point is up high, pointing straight down causing huge nostril shadows. gotta control that.

In this example, you can see the sun, as powerful as it is, being used as a hair light

This out-take speaks for itself

balancing foreground and background and maintaining color integrity.

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