It was something I have been wanting to do for a long time, but didn’t have the guts to do it.

By “location” I mean simply going out to the city streets with my model and photographing her out there. I was always thinking – “what other people would think?” or “what would they say?” or something like that. But since I actually want to make progress in my photography, I thought doing photo shoot like that was absolutely necessary.

So I took my camera, my lighting equipment, my model :), and went out. Of course I didn’t just started wandering on the streets looking for nice places to be my locations. I noticed these locations beforehand while driving by, and thought that they would make a nice setting for a photo shoot.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 1. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

My lighting equipment was very simple – one Canon EX430 flash on a stand with umbrella and one cheap Chinese flash unit. I also had gels and gobos.  The flashes were triggered remotely by wireless flash triggers.

During this photo shoot I had several problems from which I learned a lot, and now want to share with you.

• It was a night time and my model, Ira, was wearing a black coat.  It was pretty difficult to properly light the black coat in the dark. And though I planned that Ira would wear that coat during most of the shoot, eventually I had to give up and ask her to take it off. But! I also decided to use this lack of details to my advantage and tried to create compositions where it would add to the overall look instead of detracting from it.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 2. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

• This one is more tricky one, so pay attention: As I said I was using cheap Chinese remote flash triggers. The thing with them that they only trigger the flash, nothing more than that, so you have to use flash in manual control. But this wasn’t a problem. The thing is that when you shoot a person on a dark background, for example  in a street at night, lit with street lights, and you want to light your person with a flash but you also want the background to be visible, you will have to use second curtain flash. This is a setting that you set in your camera, and I couldn’t do it because the remote flash triggers that I use do not support that. I found solution for this problem, but I am not fully satisfied with it: I put my camera on a tripod and first shot the background without the model exposing for the background. Then I started shooting Ira without moving my camera but having her adjusting her location so that she would be where I want her in the frame. And later in Photoshop I combined the foreground with the background.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 3. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

• My additional problem was focusing in the dark. In one location it was really dark – the closest street light was pretty far away, so that I had trouble auto-focusing. I have a Canon and I heard that Nikon has better auto-focusing in the dark. But in my case I wish I had a headlight so I could light my scene with it enabling my camera to focus. Eventually I had to focus manually, but I learned from it and in the future I will always have a flash light with me when shooting after dark.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 4. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

• And one last problem I would like to talk about was wind. I was lucky enough and the wind wasn’t strong, but if it would be just a little bit stronger, it would ruin my whole shoot. It is simple really – you have an umbrella on a light stand. Umbrella = sail. If wind blows into it, it will fall if the light stand doesn’t have counterweight. So always think about this when shooting outside and have something heavy to attach to the light stand.

On-location Photo Shoot, photo 5. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

This is it for now. I hope my experience will help you on your photographic journey, and as always any comments about this article or about my photos presented here are welcome.

Cheers,

Greg.