How to Shoot One Light Dramatic Portraits On Location By Yourself

11/20/2014 ISO 1200 Magazine 0 Comments

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This week on The Slanted Lens, Jay P Morgan is in Maine heading out to Stonington to photograph fishermen. His goal with today's lesson is to show how you can get dramatic results with a single light and working on your own. He has no assistants with him, he isdoing this all by himself. Julene is with him but she will only be shooting behind-the-scenes footage to show what he is doing. This is the story:

My Run and Gun Setup
I am going to use a Photoflex Triton on a stand with an Octodome that has a grid on it. The reason I choose this so often is that it is small and easy to move around. The footprint isn't very big and it also doesn't have a large dome on top that is going to get blown around in the wind. I will hang two Triton batteries from the stand to act as a weight but also to give me a backup as soon as I need one. I don't want to have to take several trips back to the car and we don't have a lot of time with these fishermen before the sun goes down. To add more weight to the stand, I am using a PhotoFlex RockSteady portable sandbag with a couple water bottles in each side. This is what I will carry around.

Shooting Process
I am using a method of mixing one strobe light as the key with ambient light as the fill. I am only one person so I don’t want to move a strobe and a Fill light. I want to carry a strobe in one hand and a camera on a tripod in the other. This will make me mobile so I can move to the next setup without having to go back and get things. A Canon 5D Mark III with a Tamron 24-70mm 2.8 lens is my primary camera. I want to capture portraits and the background so this wider angle lens is perfect. My secondary camera is another Mark III on my hip in the Spider Holster; this one has a Tamron 70-200mm 2.8 lens to get nice close up shots. I will use a Pocket Wizard on the camera to trigger my light. I wish I had two triggers but when I put the secondary camera at my side, I would have knocked the trigger off the hot shoe. Moving the trigger from camera to camera slows me down a little but not too much.

Camera Settings
First, I am shooting on Manual. It is very hard to balance strobes and daylight when on any other setting. I set my shutter at 1/60th of a second and then open the aperture up until I get a comfortable ambient exposure. I am using the open daylight to fill his face, then I add my Triton and dial it up or down until I get a nice highlight on his face. I am using a grid on the Photoflex Octodome so that I can keep the light more focused and not have the strobe reveal itself by spilling all over the dock.

I am not in love with this setup so I moved my first subject around to the corner of the building and reset my aperture. I want the background to be a bit darker here and I can control that with my ambient exposure. It is a bit of a dance though because I do not want the fill on his face to be too dark. To compensate, I will bring the light around and use a more frontal key light.

I photographed several fishermen in this open light. This method of shooting for open shadows is easy to do and ideal when you are working alone with one light. I will post a new video of how I lit these portraits each week on www.TheSlantedLens.com so make sure you check back often to see them all.