You don’t need massive lighting gear!!!

But what you do need is: BRAIN!!! Think about your desired lighting. If you do want to shoot with soft light, then you just have to look out for a location giving you your desired effect.

1. Take a close look at the photo below.
2. And take a closer look at the kind of light being used by us.
3. And then take an even closer look at the result of this particular lighting.

- click on image to enlarge -

Solutions:

1. Nice photo…
2. I can clearly see some very soft light!!!
3. There is a very cool flow of lighting from the left to the right. It is small but it shows the viewer a not so clean lighting. It makes the photo more natural and interessting.

What we do want to talk about today is the natural (because it is just there) use of lighting. Very often you do not even have to use artificial lighting. You can just use what MOTHER NATURE gives you.

This is the way the photo above was made!

As you can see on the scribble above. We placed our model in the shadow of a wall. This left the resulting area on the left as our big light source. There was no direkt light on the model but still the reflection light was stronger then the “shadow”.

It is very important that you don’t just go “into the shadow” with your model to just avoid the direct sunlight. You have to look out for a controlled lighting. You do want to have some highlights or some lighting effects.

For example the reflections in the eyes. It is a perfect way to show you what we mean. The reflections in the eye give a natural focus on the eyes. The concentrate the viewers attention.

All of you know how the reflections in the eyes of the model look when using a big softbox. Now take a close look at the crop down below. It is the crop of the right eye of the image above. As you can see, the reflection looks like a nice softbox. :-) Perfect for some soft light.

And here you go with the proof. No lighting gear used at all! Just thinking about existing light!

And now we take some time to do some product presentation. Normally we would not do such direct advertisment. But you do know us. If there is one cool thing out there, we are here to tell you. And believe in me, we did try a whole lot of straps. One third of them tried to strangle us, the second third produced awesome blisters and the rest was not really trustful in carrying 3000 Euros.

And as always we tell you the truth. One day, we recieved a parcel from Peter Geller from California Sunbounce. In the small parcel we found two of some funny looking straps. First, we tried to put on the strap as a normal strap – around the neck. Just imagine that picture… pretty funny… but then we used it as it was designed to do and suddenly we experienced some new feeling. The 4kg of camera plus 70-200 lense was suddenly gone. It felt like 1kg, max!!!

If you do find that attractive, then visit this site here. If not, go on making cool photos… The strap will not change the quality of your photos… that’s for sure!

If you still think about the reliability of the strap, if you ask yourself whether the strap is safe enough for you camera… just have a look at the photo below!!! Trust us… we would not hang THAT CAMERA on the strap without trusting in quality and idea.

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