Behind the Scenes: Promo shoot with Kylee Epp

We were chasing magic hour trying to capture soft, sultry backlit promo shots for musician, Kylee Epp. We sat there waiting for the sun to peek through a metal staircase just behind Kylee’s head, illuminating her hair and giving the photo a kiss of lens flare.

When the sun hit it’s mark, we had about 5 minutes to capture the perfect shot. Man, is magic hour a stressful time for photographers. I wait everyday for it, because honestly the light quality you get during magic hour (the hour before sunset) is unprecedented. Golden and warm and soft and yum! But, you have to be quick because magic hour melts fasta’ than budda on popcorn.

Some technical details of the shoot for all you Strobist photogeeks: We were shooting with the Canon Xti and the 85mm f/1.8 & the 50mm f/1.4 In order to create soft, warm light on her face we used Pocket Wizards (wireless radio transmitters) to trigger the 430EX with a 1/4 CTO gel at 1/4 power through a large shoot-through umbrella about 2ft (60cm) from her face.

If you listen to TWiP, you’ve probably heard Scott Bourne say this a few times: “The bigger the light source is and the closer to the subject the light is the softer the light will be.” He’s totally on it, so remember this rule. It’s golden.

Once we lost the light in the first location we booked it to Jericho Beach to catch some sexy sunset shots.

Ryland and I switched off taking shots and directing the shoot. It was cool to see the shots that resulted from two photographer’s combined creativity.

Plus, somebody needed to be in charge of the umbrella and flash as it was super windy. Earlier in the shoot, we totally bent this umbrella, when a gust of wind sent it crashing down on Kylee’s head. I told her that she was now one step closer to becoming a model. After all, you can’t really call yourself a model until you’ve had at least one piece of equipment fall on you or, like, fainted during a shoot cuz you haven’t eaten in like, a week.

Note to self: Invest in some sandbags or weights to keep light stands from on models. Keep granola bars in bag to feed starving models before they faint.

As we were losing light we roped in one of Kylee’s friends to hold a third 430EX with 1/4 CTO flash for a warm edge light. As you can tell, she was lovin’ every minute of it. I think she’s has future camera assistant written all over her face. o_0

Thanks for all your great Summertime shots! I’m really enjoying all your awesome entries for my first photo comp. If you haven’t already submitted something, join the Mostly Photos Comp group on Flickr and show us your best summer shot. I also encourage you to go look at other people’s shots and comment and discuss and inspire each other!