No more natural ambient ...

Something I wanted to do for a long time, i remebered some shots i saw on the net a few years ago and wanted to try this out for a long time.

- Connie & Kimberly -

In my mind I already knew how the pictures would look, just needed the right environment and mainly a goob backdrop with a lot of tiny little lights in different colors, these little lights can be found where there's a lot of industry so Antwerp harbour area with all it's nightly activity revealed itself to be the ideal place. But I wasn't so keen on going for a shoot by myself and a model, the harbor remains a strange place with people from all over the world.

On a friday night we got together in the smallest Harbor in Antwerp, Lillo. Bart, Annelies, Michaël, Connie, Kimberly and Anouk as my model and Sophie Adam who did Anouk's make-up.

My timing was not so good as we missed the perfect shooting moments during the sunset because the models were still in make-up... but this was going to be a night shoot so get on with it :-p

Michaël knew a "good" place for the shoot but on the other side of the harbour, so we drove for a while and arrived at a strange place with lots of metal tubes, plates, rods and a big ship from Hong Kong, Michaël imediatly asked permission to shoot on the ship at the Chinese guys and while the Captain was a sleep he got a big OK from the crew. Those guys could only take there eyes of from our models while they were filming or taking pictures...

As Bart and Michaël did a lot of shooting on the ship, I decided to stay an "terra ferma" and make some "other" pictures, with the little ligths on the other side of the Schelde and the beatiful reflection in the water this was going to be a good starting place, controling light-spill in these conditions is mandatory and to make it extra difficult i tried to use the tiny amounts of available light as rim or hair light...

Most is shot at f2.8 1/30 ISO800 with "one light" the westcott 28" Softbox + SB-900, or my new 40cm beauty dish on the 800Ws ringflash, but this powers down only to f:5.6 @ ISO 200 so i had to play around with the shutter speed, gone as far as 1/8th with rear curtain sync, but the softbox was the better option!

The most difficult part is that I could not see the models face, so i had no idea of her expression or eye direction when taking the pictures

- Anouk , MUA: Sophie Adam -

Exif / strobist info : D700, 70-200 vrII @ f2.8 ± 200mm, 1/30th (flashlight freezes model so she is tack sharp)

Westcott Apollo on the left at about 3meters (9feet) with SB-900 Manual power @ 1/32th

Same Exif as before, only moved the westcott to the right and back to the left for the next shots

For these 2 shots i used the beauty dish, but controlling the spill is harder than with the recessed front of the softbox (almost like an egg-crate)