Mastering the Model Shoot: Everything a Photographer Needs to Know Before, During, and After the Shoot (Mark Gipson's Library) by Frank Doorhof

Author:Frank Doorhof
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Published: 2014-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

When I taught in Dubai at Gulf Photo Plus (GPP), I had a few wishes: One of them was doing street photography, which is awesome there. Another one was much more important to me. For years, I had the idea of shooting a model in the desert with a long, floating dress (red, of course), so when we went to Dubai, that was high on my wish list.

Now, when we travel, we don’t have a lot of free time. Yeah, sure, we see a lot of places. But to be honest, if we have three days to look around, we call it a vacation. Often we’ll only have one, or maybe two days if we are lucky. This was true in Dubai.

Originally, the shoot was planned, then cancelled due to a problem with the model. But, because I had this in my head (and thanks to the help of the wonderful people at GPP), we found a replacement model and someone who was willing to drive us into the desert (and bring us back). However, the replacement model also cancelled less than two hours before the actual shoot. One might panic and think, “You know what? Just forget it.” But, we pushed through and found yet another model, and although she did not have the long red dress, she was without a doubt drop-dead gorgeous and had some other nice dresses, so who was I to complain? :D

Now, to light a shot like this is actually not that hard, however getting the shot is hard. The first obstacle is getting there—you need a piece of desert that is not destroyed by footprints or car tracks, because you want the sand as pristine as possible. Of course, I wanted the red glow, so we had to find an area where the sand would turn a bit red when the sun set (I did not know there were so many options, to be honest). To get there, we drove approximately one hour (make sure you go to the restroom before leaving civilization, because doing it in the sand, well, I’m still finding dust and sand in my bags so...no, I won’t go there. Literally).

When we found a nice area, we had to climb a rather large sand dune—and I mean large. Of course, I didn’t wear flip-flops, so taking two steps up meant sometimes going three steps down, but hey, I’m in good health, so I pushed through, but this did qualify as a medium-hard workout. Next time I will leave my shoes in the car.

When we found the spot, the model had to walk from the back up to her position because I did not want any footprints. I knew that metering the light wouldn’t be an option due to the fast fading sun, and if you have to re-meter, there is a huge chance that you will leave footprints in the sand.

So, for this shot I used two flashes on TTL mode. Why two? Well, not only because it gave

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