This photo shoot shows that sometimes it is not the worst thing if your plans go astray. Jusztina Hermann of Delighter’s Theatre and I had planned to first do a photo composite where her outfit, a dress with a large train, would be composited out of multiple photos of a small piece of fabric. She would then change to an outfit more appropriate for fire handling.
First a crisis at home delayed Jusztina for about an hour, which meant it got too dark for a proper fire photoshoot after we were done with the first concept. Second, the piece of fabric she brought was translucent, so the idea of the composite dress went out of the window too (it would be next to impossible to extract it from the background in Photoshop). So we had to improvise. Fortunately, there was a little bit of wind and it made the translucent fabric take all sorts of interesting shapes.
I took a few photos with natural light only, but they came out flat. And the floating pice of fabric blended too much with the background. So for the rest of the shoot I used one speedlight camera left to light Jusztina and one speedlight camera right to light the floating piece of fabric, making it just pop from the background, which I underexposed.
The first photos were taken a while before sunset using my 16-35mm. I love the pastel colours.
As the sun went down on the horizon, we noticed the colours on the sky and it was time to turn my camera ninety degree to the left and switch to a longer lens, my 70-200mm.
As the colours in the sky became more and more vivid, I chose a lower camera angle to show more of the sky.
Jusztina and I were both very happy with the end result. Plans going awry is not always a bad thing.
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