Practical: Shoots 1 to 4

I had hoped to get a running start to the course but unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. The first shoot, was spent learning to use the Broncolor Siros 800 lights and app. Unfortunately, despite spending ages, watching videos on the Broncolor Youtube page, learning the Broncontrol app, felt like I was wading through deep water and I was having various issues with the lights doing things, I had not programmed them to do. This turned out to be. Students not resetting the settings of the flash on, the flash but by the time I had worked this out, I had decided to move onto other things.

During the first shoot, I was getting so frustrated, that I decided to do a fairly simple setup. Using gels to light the subject. But I did not want to do the same as I have done before. Previously, I had shot the gels, directly onto skin and found that I didn’t like the effect, particularly on the transition between one colour to another.

So for my first experiment, I decided to start bouncing light off of a polyboard onto the subject. to creating a softer light and nicer transition. The theory being, that by bouncing the light off of the polyboard, I would create a bigger light source, which would reflect back onto the skin.

For this shoot, I decided to use the black side of the polyboard. Black would absorb the light but with the polyboards being relatively close to the subject, I would not lose all the light. I also angled one of the flashes, so that the light would only partly hit the polyboard and would also reflect onto the background, whilst the second light would reflect back onto me and the background.

Overall, I was very pleased with how the image came out and decided to spend more time experimenting and decided to do some more experiments, where I reflected light off of an umbrella, with different inners (white, black, silver) to see what the effects were on the subject.

As expected. The black inner absorbed the light, whilst the white and silver reflected the light. I used two coloured gels, red and yellow. Again, as expected the red came out very strong, whilst the yellow, felt washed out. There is a lot of science into wavelengths and such matter but I am really only interested in the practical benefits.

One of the things, that I felt I had to do wat to be cable to control the reflected light more, which led me to my next photoshoot.

The next shoot, involved me trying to control the light more. To achieve this. I used a gelled flash, reflecting the light off of a silver umbrella. I then used polyboards to reduce the light spill. I also used a gelled background light to create different coloured backgrounds.

Whilst, things didn’t go quite a planned and I think I could have done better with the image. Overall, I am very pleased with the results. The idea was to learn new things and I think I achieved that. Also, I hadn’t done a lot of photography over the previous year, so this was a good step back into photography.