For anyone expecting and would like a photoshoot but curious about my technique, please see Jessika and Josh’s shoot from 2016 here https://tvgabe.com/jessika-josh. Please follow along as I describe the details about how this shoot took place.
We did this photoshoot in October of 2016 in Roseville at William Taylor Park along Dry Creek near the Miner’s Ravine trail. This park is in the Enwood neighborhood which is across from my neighborhood, Sierra Vista near the Crooked Bridge. At the time, Jessika and Josh lived in the neighborhood only a few blocks away.
This park has changed a lot over the years. Enwood is still among my favourite neighborhoods in Roseville just for the proximity to the creek. The street to get to this park has a dead end and is very narrow. Back in the day this park was just a field adjacent to this riparian woodland. I remember because in high school my friend Dan knew this girl, I think her name was Alisha. She lived across the street from what today is the park. Apparently Alisha did not go to school but just stayed home all day. So we would come here to hang and smoke for lunch. I remember Alisha was this real skinny girl with long blonde hair. Her house was dark, musty, dank, and vintage.
For this shoot we shot entirely at the park. I used my trusty Canon Rebel T5i, EF 85mm f/1.8 USM, 600EX-RT speedlight, and ST-E3-RT transmitter which was a new addition to my pack at the time. I employed my Interfit foldable butterfly dish as a light modifier for the speedlight. This shoot took place on October 22, 2016 from 3:50PM to 6:02PM. October in Roseville is a nice time to shoot outdoors for the length of daylight and mild weather.
The beauty dish in the behind the scenes photo is foldable and made by Interfit. I bought this from Action Camera in Roseville. When I purchased this I also bought the shoe mount flash accessory mount made by ProMaster. The Interfit foldable beauty dish has a Bowens mount because it was designed to be fitted onto a strobe which are more expensive and often less portable then a speedlight. The ProMaster accessory mount is like an adapter for using shoe mount flash such as the Canon 600EX-RT. With the accessory mount I can mount this modifier on to any of my light stands such as the Kupo 080AC seen in action in the behind the scenes photo above. I bought the Kupo from PhotoSource in Sacramento several years ago.
As I mentioned previously, the Canon ST-E3-RT was a new addition to my kit at the time. It took some time getting used to and in fact I still struggle to fully understand everything this transmitter (and speedlight) can do. The menu settings on both the transmitter and flash can be difficult to navigate. However, I was able to learn how to wirelessly connect the transmitter and speedlight for full remote operation. Sometimes I get confused about the flash metering systems such as TTL and ETTL. Someday I would like to experiment with using stroboscopic flash where a slow shutter speed is used in the camera and the flash fires multiple times in one shot to capture an object in motion.
Shooting with the Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM is such as joy. I particularly enjoy all the bokeh you can achieve with this prime lens. With that in mind, I have learned from my past experiences shooting wide open and getting blurry photos where the nose or eyes of my subject are in focus but everything else drops softly out of focus. To prevent this I kept my f stop around f/4.5 at 100 iso and around 1/100s of a second.
In addition to the speedlight/transmitter/modifier combo, I employed my ProMaster 5-in-one reflector disc. I believe this is 42″ wide when unfolded. I used the gold side with mixed results.
Approaching golden hour, the sun was at the right angle for me to use my secondary tripod as a reflector holder with some grips I bought from Home Depot. As you can see in the photo below, the reflector was too low and caused some glow in the image which almost works for me. I have since learned that the reflector needs to be held up high and downward. I have employed assistants with this task but they hardly understand the importance of bouncing light into the eyes so again, I get mixed results.
The next photo is an example of where the low reflector works. This is because the subject, Jessika, is sitting on the grass. The light bounces right into Jessika’s eyes giving a nice golden sparkle.
Have a look at a few sample images below and be sure to check out the rest at https://tvgabe.com/jessika-josh.
