Das Krolop Gerst Blog

Hey folks,

it’s time for a new and better setup-tutorial than ever. :-) This time, there will be no sketches or skribbles of any kind. It’ll be just one making-of shot… and than, it’ll be a whole lot of final photos…

When we speak about setups, we always talk a lot of about only one setup. Today, I want to use this posting to take your attention to another level. Actually, it’s bullshit to think of a shooting as one specific setup. It’s always about changes. Little changes that mark the way to the final and the best photo of the day.

You start with a idea, start with a basic setting and then you start to change little by little a the things you can change. Talking about this, you could actually say, that up to today, we always showed you the final / the resulting setup. But we never showed you the way to get there.

This is goint to change with this posting.

Take a look at the BTS-shot down below. You can see our lighting gear and you can see the “BASIC SETUP”. The idea with this shooting was to get a urban look an a different fashion look. Not the usual, desaturated skin, but a more colorful, playful look.

Our model was Elisabeth, Marc and me often changed places between photographing and holding the flash.

OFTEN TAKE A STEP BACK TO GET A NEW LOOK AT THE THINGS YOU DO. WHEN HOLDING THE FLASH, WE OFTEN FIND THE BEST IDEAS TO IMPROVE THE SETTING.

We used the new Elinchrom Ranger Quadra (Q) 400Ws portable flash system. We took two seperated strobe heads with us. So we would be able to set two lightsources.

The basic setup was, as you can see, a simple umbrella. We started shooting at about 5.30 am. So let’s go through all of the setups and shots. What you see from now on are our final photos. Retouched and digitally modified. :-) But I hope you do know, that we never need a lot of retouching… :-) Only photographers who can’t photograph have to sit in front of photoshop for hours.

1. photo: BASIC SETUP – UMBRELLA JUST ABOVE THE CAMERA
16-35mm lens at 16mm at f3.2

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BACKGROUND
We started very simples with a basic lighting from above the camera. An umbrella hold by hand with a boomstick to be very flexible and to be able to get of the street real quick. It was to dark to really shoot high quality so we ended up with ISO 800 at 3.2 at 16mm… Not quite the best thing you can have when photographing.

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2. photo: NO FLASH-SETUP – AL PURE
85mm lens at f1.4

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BACKGROUND
So we changed lenses, switched to a open aperture lens at f1.4. That reduced ISO-spped and made pushed quality up in the skies. But the look wasn’t the same. We could not use that extrem wide-angle… the look was rather normal. We did’nt even use one single flash for that setup. Always have a look what the location looks like without any correction by yourself.

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3. photo: MORE LIGHT SETUP – AL PLUS FLASH POWER
50mm lens at f2.0

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BACKGROUND
The look without a flash was not good enough… :-)… so we switched on the Ranger… AGAIN! This time with the aperture of 2.0… enough AL and a bit of FLASH POWER!

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4. photo: SECOND FLASH – TWO STROBES ARE BETTEN THAN ONE!
50mm lens at f2.5

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BACKGROUND
One flash is never enough :-)… not for us… so we tried out a more artificial look. A second flash from behind to get a seperation from the background to our model. We changend the balance of AL and flash towards the strobes.

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5. photo: MOVEMENT-SETUP – AI SERVO AND A LOT OF PHOTOS!
85mm lens at f2.5

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BACKGROUND
The look was cool but we didn’t really like the posing/style of the photo. The long and even street was perfect to be a wide and open CATWALK… so we let Elisabeth walk directly towards us and constantly fired in AI SERVO mode. The Ranger Q let’s you fire rapid shots up to 7 shots a second. And by the way, we took of all the umbrellas… so bare strobes.

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6. Foto: PLAY SOME ROCK…
24mm TSE lens at f3.5

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BACKGROUND
Time was nearly over, we had done everything that had to be done. ON TOP OF IT… we took out our 24mm Tilt & Shift lens to do some depth of field tricks… :-)

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That’s it… REMEMBER! SAME GEAR, SAME LOCATION, SAME MODEL, SAME TIME… the whole shooting took place in about 30 minutes. So we shot over 400 photos during this time… Every minute we had to step of the street to not be run over by a car. And now you can clearly see the basic idea of todays posting. It’s about little changes… the process of finding the perfect photo. OR EVEN MORE IMPORTANT… the way of finding the best setup to be able to shoot the best photo. Never concetrate to much on one setup but always look out for another changement!!!

CREATIVITY GOES HAND IN HAND WITH CHANGES!

Hey folks, it’s time for a new and better setup-tutorial than ever. :-) This time, there will be no sketches or skribbles of any kind. It’ll be just one making-of...

SETUP TUTORIALS COACHING, fashion, fortgeschrittene, retouching., SETUP TUTORIALS, shooting, strobes, Strobist