MichaelSewell
Mu-43 All-Pro
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Anyway, what's a music contest got to do with the above image? Well, as part of the prize for winning the competition, the band would get a shoot with yours truly. So off I trundle to York to meet the group.
The above image was almost at the end of the shoot, at 1430hrs. I wanted a moody look to the image, and the bright sunshine would certainly create interest. I wanted to drop the ambient as much as possible, and then create enough light to make the group pop against the background. I used five bare speedlights, no modifiers. For one reason, I needed as much light as possible, and secondly, the way the speedlights were to be spread out, they would act as fill lights for each other.
Two speedlights to the left of the group, one central, and another two to the right of the group. All speedlights were on full power. The speedlights were triggered by Lencarta Mach 1N transceivers, now defunct. Any trigger that can manage a tail hack will do. So the Godox Cell II triggers for Canon and Nikon etc. Okay, it's old hat now.
Nowadays, you would use an Olympus dedicated TTL trigger, and use HSS to get the same effect, with a little more finesse, and a lot less fuss.
1/8000th sec ISO200 f5
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Last shot of the day, taken about twenty minutes after the top image. It had become a little more overcast, so dropping the ambient was much easier, which was a boon as the lights actually needed to be further away from the group for this. Similar sort of set up insofar as there were two speedlights at each side, one high and the second about elbow height. You can see the light path on the wall. Again, there was a single central speedlight which was immediate camera right, as can be seen by the shadowing behind the group members. The vignette effect isn't added in post, it's the natural light fall off due to the dropped ambient. Same old school tail hack technique.
1/2000th sec ISO200 f4
For those that love a good chortle at my expense, there's the behind the scenes video here:
This was from quite some time ago, and I felt it was quite useful to see what we used to do before HSS.