Ayla Sky nude shoot 2 { BTS video }

Over the summer I had another marvellous shoot with one of my favourite models, Ayla Sky. We rented a fantastic little one bedroom shack out in the middle of nowhere to use as the location and spent all day shooting there.

I set up a video camera on a tripod and left it running as we where working and also shot some HD footage on the 7D. What follows is a 6min edit of all that footage along with a few of the finished images.

For this shoot I wanted to keep things simple and use lots of natural (or natural looking) light. I used the canon 7D, 24-105 F4 lens, 50mm f1.4 lens and the 320ex flash through a shoot through umbrella.  The flash was triggered using the 7D built in flash, which worked pretty well and meant I could keep the camera in AV mode and not worry too much about the changing ambient light level.

I was basically using the flash just to bolster the light coming in through the windows, and occasionally to create a bit of lens flare to create the illusion of sunlight coming through the windows (it was overcast and raining pretty much the whole time we where there!)

If you missed it you can find my post on the first shoot I did with Ayla here. 

You can see more of the finished images on my website ~ www.image23.co.uk

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Click through for the video and more pictures...

Lighting: Spotlight Silhouette

This set up is really easy and a great way of creating strong images with bags of 'pop'. I used an elinchrom Dlite 2it to light the background. it was on a floor stand pointing up at the wall, bare bulb, and set to 3. I then mounted a flash gun with a 1inch deep grid spot attached on a stand. This was set to 1/4 power and placed just infront of the model, slightly off to camera right.

Essentially what this gives me is a wall that's exposed to f11 and a very small spot light that exposes to f8 which i can use to light small areas of the silhouetted model. I set my camera to F8, 1/200th, ISO 100, so that the spotlit area would be correctly exposed, the background slightly over exposed and the shadows nice and black.

The only tricky part with this set up is ensuring that your spotlight is pointing at the right thing. Because a small spotlight is so hyper directional, even small changes in the models position can have a dramatic effect. I've found though, if you make the model aware of this and keep checking and re-adjusting, you'll be fine.