I recently had workshop here at my studio in Franklin, TN and I've shared a few of the images on my instagram already, but I wanted to take a deeper dive into one of the shots that was actually taken outside of the studio.
While most of the workshop was inside the studio, for the last setup of the day we stepped outside and snapped some shots of Allee in my new (to me... sort of) truck. It used to be my grandpa's truck, then my dad had it and I actually drove it to school for one year of high school. Anyway, enough about the truck!
As you can see from the picture above, it was a pretty overcast day, so there was no way we were going to get a really dynamic golden hour image with just natural light. Here is the image with just natural light so you can see how dull it was.
The first step was to add a light with a gel in front of the truck to create the illusion of direct sunlight at golden hour. I used a Paul C. Buff Einstein with a yellow and orange gel to warm up the scene and mimic natural light.
Honestly I could have stopped here, but if you take a closer look behind Allee, the background was still a pretty dull gray. That immediately takes you out of the scene and makes the viewer think that the shot was lit with strobes rather than having the feel of natural light. In order to help complete the scene I placed a second Einstein with the same gel combination directly behind the truck pointed at the wall check out the next image to see just the background light.
This light was very subtle, but it did the trick and warmed up the background to really bring the whole image together.
Here's another angle of the behind the scenes image to give you a better idea of light placement.
This was such an amazing workshop and I have another one scheduled for April 11th at my studio here in Franklin, TN. If you want to take your photography to the NEXT LEVEL, and create some amazing images for your portfolio, click here, and in the meantime, download my FREE lighting guide here!
To see another way to create Golden Hour On Demand, check out this video.
Until next time,
Jeff Carpenter