Here’s another Alyona Ozernykh shot. One of my fav

In case you forgot who is Alyona Ozernykh, she was this model i photographed previously. Now she made it big!

Here’s another of my fav from the set. It was also shortlisted for the Digital Photographer of the Year award 2009 (Fashion category).

There’s a story behind this shot actually.

While we were busy moving on to another shot, she sat down on the sofa and basically nua while waiting for us.

I turned around to see an interesting shadow formed because of sunset.

However, by the time i want to capture the shot, the &@#^% sun was blocked by the cloud.

In the end, i decided to recreate the shot using strobes.

Here’s a rough sketch using a mouse:

The trick here is to recreate the hard shadows of Alyona complete with the orange sunset glow. So the natural thing to do was to take my ranger flash head as far from her on the right (where the window was). This makes the light source small and creating the defined shadow. To match the orange glow of the sun, i slapped a CTO over the ranger head.

So yeah… simple lesson about lighting here:

Small light source = hard shadows

Big light source = soft shadows

This is why photographing your friends using a digi-cam’s flash (small light source) produces unflattering shadows.

But i guess i shall leave this for another day. I actually done up some slides about this not too long back. Will put it up when i have the time.

No related posts.