How To Shoot Dramatic Portraits By Yourself With Only A Single Light And On Location
Nov 28, 2014
Tiffany Mueller
Tiffany Mueller is a photographer and content strategist based in Hawi, Hawaii. Her work has been shared by top publications like The New York Times, Adobe, and others.
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Who says pulling off an entire photoshoot by yourself needs to be difficult? Not Jay P. Morgan. In the quick video clip below he invites us behind the scenes of photoshoot he did on location in Maine. Morgan wanted to photograph fisherman on his first visit to New England, but he traveled light for this trip, only carrying a single light and softbox along with his camera. Seeing as how he only had two hours to setup and complete the shoot, not having an extensive lighting setup kind of worked as an advantage. He had an assistant along with him, but her job was strictly to film the behind the scenes footage, Morgan handled the photoshoot all on his own.
Curious as to how he pulled it off? Here’s the scoop:
[ via The Slanted Lens ]
Tiffany Mueller
Tiffany Mueller is a photographer and content strategist based in Hawi, Hawaii. Her work has been shared by top publications like The New York Times, Adobe, and others.
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2 responses to “How To Shoot Dramatic Portraits By Yourself With Only A Single Light And On Location”
I’m wondering if it’s possible to have DIY Photo (or a good photographer) to do a nice real life (like this scenario) situation and do a comparison of using a gridded strobe with sandbad and batteries versus a flashgun with some gel as needed. Seems like (and I stress the “seems”) it’s possible to get the same (if not real close) lighting required without all that weight and expense. The light is so close to the subject (portraits) that you really don’t need all that power – just a good amount of diffusion. I did a snow-shoot with a flashgun and gel and it looks pretty darn as effective as this.
Well, you could do a fairly similar thing with a speedlight and an shoot through umbrella or even just bounced off a white reflector or even styrofoam. As we could see in the video the ambient light was not really bright ( F6.1, 1/60th, ISO 200 ) so you wouldn’t even need a huge amount of flashpower because there was no sun to overpower. So yeah, in this situation you wouldn’t necessarily need all his gear and could do it with an even lighter setup.