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Archive 2016 · Golden hour

  
 
Numfar
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Golden hour


Congratulations to Numfar for winning Feature Thread of the Week with 6 votes - View Previous Winners


...well, I only WISH it was an hour...

Shot in St. Bart's in London during the 3-5 minutes of the day when sun beams in through the very high upper windows. Luckily incense had been burning and put a nice haze of smoke in the air. Or maybe the place is just that dusty - but either way, the day was partly cloudy and you really only have moments when the light comes in like that, so I had to rush real fast to get this shot (we'd been shooting in near darkness on the other side of the church when this started to happen, so I rushed the model, my assistant and me over to this spot and started changing settings (camera and packs) on the fly to get *something* with this light. This was the best of what we got before the light went away.







Jan 14, 2016 at 09:49 PM
Mike Crosa
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Golden hour


Very nice. I like it a lot.


Jan 14, 2016 at 10:05 PM
markdennis
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Golden hour


Excellent work as usual. You really are talented.


Jan 15, 2016 at 04:48 AM
DownToThis
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Golden hour


This is a fantastic pic! Well timed.


Jan 15, 2016 at 12:26 PM
Shiva dancing
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Golden hour


Beautiful composition.


Jan 15, 2016 at 12:28 PM
Ipanematom
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Golden hour


Another stunning composition!


Jan 15, 2016 at 04:50 PM
greg swan
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Golden hour


Wow, absolutely beautiful


Jan 15, 2016 at 04:57 PM
Charles Loy
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Golden hour


Agree, fantastic photo. Nice example of sharp background focus enhancing a photo.


Jan 16, 2016 at 06:35 PM
CDesignart
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Golden hour


Rembrandt like, stunning.


Jan 16, 2016 at 07:13 PM
Sharona
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Golden hour


That's all you could get? Sheesh. 😳

Quite stunning. I am a big fan!



Jan 16, 2016 at 10:47 PM
Robert E
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Golden hour


This is what great photography is all about. Numfar you captured "a moment in time". Excellent work!


Jan 23, 2016 at 07:59 AM
mhsinca
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Golden hour


I'd like to be able to 'get something' this outstanding more often! Great work in a time crunch.



Jan 23, 2016 at 06:44 PM
mhsinca
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Golden hour


I'd like to be able to 'get something' this outstanding more often! Great work in a time crunch.



Jan 23, 2016 at 06:44 PM
Numfar
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Golden hour


mhsinca wrote:
I'd like to be able to 'get something' this outstanding more often! Great work in a time crunch.


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.



Jan 23, 2016 at 07:09 PM
prairietom
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · Golden hour


Yeah, maybe YOU don't realize what you know. The words "changing settings on the fly" clue me in that along with everything you mentioned you now understand exposure as related to your vision and do not even really think about it. The image is impressive to me, not because of the model or location but because of your vision and knowledge of your craft.


Jan 24, 2016 at 05:34 PM
Arka
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · Golden hour


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,
...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.



Jan 24, 2016 at 06:55 PM
Todd
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · Golden hour


Beautiful and very creative. Congratulations on such a wonderful shot in such a short period of time


Jan 25, 2016 at 05:06 PM
mhsinca
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · Golden hour


NUMFAR...Thank you for the insight. Your comments are greatly appreciated and I'll put them to good use.


Feb 13, 2016 at 12:52 PM
GeorgieGirl
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · Golden hour


When you are ready to teach classes, Im in.

No wait...I see that you already do!



Feb 13, 2016 at 05:56 PM





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