As part of the Fashion course that I teach every year at CITM (Polytechnic University of Barcelona) I had already worked with Yana, a Russian model. The result of her work in class was very good and I decided to work with her again in a session I did to test the Godox portable flash equipment on the street.
Model Yana / Fleming Models
In the studio her look was very rocker, with a wide and somewhat harsh lighting to highlight the brightness of the clothes and her features, but in the outdoor session I preferred to change the style to something more “vintage”, from another era.
I chose a group of houses in the neighborhood of Poble Nou, in Barcelona, which were probably built in the 50’s, or early 60’s. It is a group of buildings in a privileged area of the city, but in an area that once must have been a popular neighborhood.
© Alba Rodríguez Núñez
The photos were taken in the late afternoon in order to have a low level of natural light and no shadows and thus be able to get a higher power with the flash over the ambient light. The Godox EX600 flash was very good, with a power output of up to 600 W/s and 10 steps of variable power. In another post I already talked about this equipment whose great virtue in my opinion is the fact that it has a Bowens bayonet, in addition to being able to be placed on the camera’s hot shoe.
Godox EX reflector
For this session, however, I used a small octagonal window of the same brand and not the Bowens Wafer windows I usually work with. The inner diffuser of the Wafer is of a high quality when it comes to dispersing the light inside the window, while in the case of the Godox octa, the inner diffuser produces a light that is not as soft and dispersed. This was not a problem as I wanted to work with a slightly harder light than usual and in this sense the Godox octa worked very well.
In some cases I worked with a +1 EV ratio, this means that the flash light was above ambient by one exposure value. In this way the light from the flash becomes more prominent, making the background somewhat underexposed.
In other cases, I just used the flash closer to Yana for softness and at a lower power, so that the flash would just fill in the shadows and give some brightness to the eyes. For this purpose, I set the flash power at -2 EV with respect to the ambient light as in the previous picture.
The sun was going down very quickly and the light changes were very noticeable. I decided to “change” the location of the sun and for this I placed the flash flush with the dress so that its volume would stand out. As can be seen in the following photograph, the sun had already gone down quite a bit.
© Alba Rodríguez Núñez
In total we did about 4 changes of clothes and charging just one Godox battery was enough. The system is very portable and lightweight and battery charging is very fast. The only somewhat flimsy part of the pack is that many parts of the torch are plastic and need to be treated with great care. Otherwise, it turned out to be a good choice for the job.
Godox EX600
My main interest in the session was to see the result of charging the battery while also seeing the character of the light produced by a window of the same brand. For this reason I did not use more accessories than this small octa, but I was varying the distance between the light source and the model to achieve different amplitudes of light and at the same time different contrasts.
I was fortunate to have a great team of collaborators, including model, stylist, makeup artist and a large group of GrisArt students who even recorded a “making of” that you can see in the following link:
© Alba Rodríguez Núñez
But let’s get back to Yana, the model. She felt more comfortable with a rocker look so when we were about to finish the session I took a few quick shots with another look. And after about 200 shots … the battery still had a charge!
Lighting scheme
All rights reserved. © Isarrualde Photography
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the author.