Shooting it: RULU in a rainy night

First location – Chayamachi

Lighting

Let me talk about the lighting, first for the main light here I chose to use a 80×60 Softbox, the main reasons for that – it was raining as hell, and it was so windy that if I chose in umbrella or something like that I would be in hard trouble keeping it up! Anyway I had my friend Evgeny with me that night, and he was helping me to hold the lights especially on the outside shoot! I’m using only one light here! My flash if Canon 580 EXII, and it has a Pocket Wizard II Plus attached, as I’m triggering it with a Phottix Atlas trigger on the camera body. I’m shooting with my Canon 5D Mark II with Canon 135/F2 lens, which is one of my favorite lenses for portrait work, I really love it! One more thing important to mention here is that if you want to have those nice reflections, you really need to get very low with the angle, and I mean you should kiss the ground, well, I was personally lying in the water while I was shooting!

Protecting the gear from the rain

Yeah, that is one of the biggest issues here! Every time when I’m shooting in the rain, and I really love doing it, I have to think how to protect my gear, so here are some of the little tips I’m using. First, all my speed-lights are inserted in transparent plastic bags while I’m shooting, because water and electricity don’t really match together! If the rain is too strong, I might pack my camera as well with a plastic bag, only opening the front part of the lens, but in normal rain, I wouldn’t bother myself doing that, because the camera turned out to be a pretty tough guy, and some water would not do a lot harm! I’m also using some bungee cords to bind the flash stands to something usually as when it’s raining in most of the cases it’s quite windy as well. Well, this was a nice strobist play in the night, here you can see the final image from the shoot!

Second location – Nakatsu

After we got pretty wet from the shoot in the rain, we had to move ant take some rest in some not that wet location, so the best close place to do this was Nakatsu, takes about 20 minutes walk in the rain to go there from Umeda!

Strobist info:

Nikon SB-26 in 80×60 Gridded Softbox – Camera Right; Canon 580EXII  with red gel on a 2.5 meter light stand outside of the warehouse to the left to create the lines in the wall; See the diagram on the right for a view of the flash position! Both of the flashes are triggered by Pocket Wizard II Plus.

Lighting

Similar to the first shot, my main light here is the 80×60 softbox, which this time I was using gridded in order to restrict a little bit more the light! I’m using this time the Nikon SB-26 as the main flash for the model, as I wanted to use the full power of the strong 580EXII which was a bit far outside of the warehouse! That’s why I set up the Nikon flash, which was just enough to lit the model. We had to do a few test shots to fix the shadows as well. I’m shooting with my Canon 5D Mark II again with the 135mm lens, and I’m triggering both flashes with Pocket Wizard II Plus, and Phottix Atlas trigger on the camera body!

In the end…

So in the end I would like to mention one more time about our new project called Creative Lightbrary! We started it recently with my friend Ognyan Dimitrov, and we are going to post everything connected to digital photography where we will cover our experience with different light modifiers, DIY stuff, lighting diagrams, post production, useful software and many other tips. Our main goal is not to teach but to give everything that is useful for your journey in the world of digital photography. Click on the logo below to check it out! Also follow our Facebook page connected with the project to subscribe for future updates, and we have prepared already many things to post soon! Here is the link to the page: Creative Lightbrary on Facebook