Tip Of The Day

Tip of the day... If you want to do a shoot at sunset make sure you actually know when sunset is.

Here's one from a concept I've been working on. There's a lot of problems with the image but I still like where its heading. The idea was to do the same idea (her jumping) but with the sunset in the background.

I messed up because I thought the sunset was at a certain time but I was off and was about 2 hours early. On top of that it ended up being much colder (about 36 degrees) and very windy and she got way too cold for her to stay in the dress till sunset. The plan was to shoot with the sun setting (so it was darker) so I only brought a single Profoto B2 to freeze her in the air.

The problem arose because it was still so bright out I couldn't get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action (without flash) without the back of her dress being completely in shadow and dark. The second problem was (again since I thought it would be darker) I couldn't get enough power out of the single B2 head to fill in the shadows on her dress and leg and maintain a fast enough shutter to freeze the action (hints the movement in her feet) while keeping the exposure correct.

If I did this again during the day with the sun so bright, I would break out several of my bigger heads and just overpower the sun and use flash and HSS to freeze the action.