How I Shot It: The Purge Edition

I love using speedlights. They're easy to set up, easy to adjust, and they produce awesome light in a very affordable package. In this post I wanted to share with you how I shot one of my current photos of my friend, Will using two speedlights.


During one of the colder nights this March, my friend Will and I decided to go shoot because we wanted to test out our speedlights. Plus, my favorite way to put off taking care of my responsibilities is to go shoot, so it ended up working out perfectly.

We found a tunnel on UNI's campus that we wanted to shoot in and Will had a creepy mask from the movie The Purge, so we decided to plan our scene with that in mind. Below is what we had for our lighting set up:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was using a total of 3 speedlights: one illuminating the subject about 3-4 feet away just above eye level, and then 2 speedlights on a light stand behind him which were positioned about 12 feet away at eye level to the subject.

After taking quite a view shots with this setup, I decided to take the large flashbender off of the speedlight illuminating his face to get a hard light instead of a soft one. I felt like the hard light would create shadows that were more defined than what they were with the soft light that was being bounced off of the flashbender. The next thing I decided to change was the back lighting setup. I had two speedlights pointed at the back of Will's head, but I decided to turn off one of them because I felt like I could get a better ratio between the key light and the back light without the second speedlight behind him.

After a a few minor changes to the lighting setup and a little bit of post-processing in Lightroom, I ended with this:

I used one speedlight to create the shadows on Will's face and then I used another speedlight behind Will to separate him from the background.

In the end, I found that I liked some of the portraits that showed some of the tunnel, but what i liked even more were the portraits where I framed the shot tighter and decreased my ambient light exposure to make Will stand out more.

Sometimes I go through the entire planning of a scene and shoot a bunch of photos only to realize that I like the one I improvised the best. Although it's a different scene than I originally had in mind, I feel like the final result turned out to be very interesting.

If you've never used a flash for portraits, I highly recommend you look into it. When I first became interested in flash photography I noticed that most of the name brand speedlights were hundreds of dollars, so I began to look at other options that were much more affordable. What I found was a company called Yongnuo that made manual speedlights that had a similar design to that of the Canon speedlights, but the Yongnuo speedlights were about 1/5 of the price. I decided to buy the Yongnuo YN560-IV for $70 and fell in love with the light quality that these affordable speedlights had to offer.

So if you're intimidated by speedlights or you don't know where to start, I highly recommend checking out the video below that shows you a very affordable lighting kit that can be purchased for less than $150. With a speedlight, you have a lot more control of your light and you can get some very dramatic results with only one light.