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Numfar wrote:
You know, if I'm being totally honest - it's not ~that~ hard at all.
At some point in your development as a photographer, images like this can look super impressive - but the really impressive things in this photo have very little to do with me, the photographer. Instead, the impressive stuff is this:
1) Model - good agency model - probably tier 2 or 3 in London, booking out at maybe $250/$400 for an hour or two.
2) Hair and Makeup - very good team, probably booking out for $200/hr ea.
3) Styling - excellent, and our stylist pulled from 3-4 different designers, plus the wardrobe at the National Theatre. Don't know what she books out for, but it's not cheap.
4) Location - Oldest cathedral in London - can't go wrong there.
5) Light - that was lucky. When the building was scouted, the light was fantastic, but on shoot day, as I note above - mostly dim and cloudy - we worked with that vibe while we had it (you have to make whatever you get work), but when it changed, one of the only real 'skillful' things I brought to the shoot was noticing it changing and insisting we move immediately to try and snag the moment.
Otherwise, what I brought to this was an okay sense of composition (the composition isn't great here because I was compromising to bring the upper windows into the shot and had maybe 20-30 seconds to see/evaluate/adjust... and I'm not THAT fast.
And the other thing was just some basic knowledge of light and how to work my camera.
That's stuff you can learn fast - like less than a week/2 weeks fast. Getting really comfortable may take 2-3 months. But by summer, you could easily have all the skill I needed here to make this shot. The rest is investment in hiring awesome creatives, finding really talented people to work with, doing workshops that put this stuff together for you or finding clients willing to foot the bill for shoots like this. I have literally done it all four ways, and at the end of the day, it doesn't matter as long as you push the button, the image is yours. If you read the light and made the composition, you did your job.
So take time and learn light. It's fairly easy - start with learning the Sunny 16 rule if you don't know it yet. Then learn to eyeball all the other general levels of light with shutter speed. There is a light-meter ap for your cell phone that costs under $10 and does a really good job at reading light - buy that and just whenever you see cool light, try and guess what your camera settings would need to be to make a shot - then meter it, you'll learn it quite fast that way.
Next, learn to mix strobe and ambient. It's just about placement and balance. Work in 1/16th 1/8th 1/4 1/2 and full levels on a hotshoe flash fired remotely through a cheapy travel softbox (that's all this is, on a monopod held up a bit high).
If you have a really good model, s/he'll take care of posing, but do pick up the odd current fashion magazine and learn 3 standing and 1 sitting and one 'on the ground' pose you can fall back on if you have to get him/her started.
That's it. Seriously, all this can be done in a couple weeks if you just do that (on your vacation, say). Or in 3-4 months if you do it a couple days a week.
Photography is not rocket science. It just looks like it when you're not really comfortable/clear on the processes of getting there. But almost anyone can do this....Show more →
You are probably being too modest here given the consistently high quality of your posts of late, but I agree that the quality of the crew is at least as important as the skills of the photographer when shooting an image like this. But none of that detracts from the well deserved praise you are receiving for this image. It's really a terrific picture, and it totally deserved a featured thread submission.
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