Shots in the Park

So, I really like faeries, fay folk, fae, sprites, satyrs, whatever you want to call them. I've long dreamed of recreating some magic realm in a mystic and beautiful way that captures the imagination. My photography is getting better and so I'm hoping to get out into High Park this summer and start creating some faerie moments.

One of the things I don't really like about people in the park/forest pictures is that the subject (presumably the person) does not really stand out from the surrounding as much as I'd like. Perhaps it's because I'm drawn to nature, but I find that branches and leaves, bushes and rocks often distract from the person in the picture.

Over the winter, I've learned how to use hotshoe flashes along with some light modifiers to bring light to a subject. I usually work hard to control the ambient, overpowering it so that I can work in studios with tungsten lights but not have to worry about colors casts when I'm using daylight-balanced flashes. If the flashes and the tungsten lightbulbs where the same brightness, then my photos would come out looking quite orange (with flash whitebalance).

So why not use the same principle in the woods. Overpower the ambient light and use flash to highlight my subject.

Yesterday I did my first shoot in the park to try to see how well I could pull this off. Here are a couple of example pictures from the shoot, showing the difference in lighting.

Here is a shot of Janine with some trees behind her. Daylight is filtering through trees to camera left and lighting her with broad lighting making for a fairly descent image.
Here Janine is being lit with two flashes, one to camera left diffused with a shoot-through umbrella and another flash behind her with a omni-bounce diffuser on it. The main light is about 2 stops over ambient. I find the forest now becomes a much more muted background and I like the way the backlight separates her from the surroundings more. I also like the 3:1 lighting ratio in the second shot more than the approximately 2:1 I was getting in the first shot.

Well, next up I'll be trying to work with snoots and gobos and see if I can get the light even more controlled.

Janine, by the way, is a wonderful actress, model, stylist and girl Friday here in Toronto. Incredibly busy, she still finds time to work with new photographers that she considers interesting. She's just fantastic to work with and has a great look - I hope we can work together again soon.