Shot Break Down #1

#1 - The Groomsmen & Late Night Cigars

It’s made with one speedlite that silhouettes the lads and back lights the smoke from the cigars. I did this in the car park outside the venue, so you make this kinda shot anywhere. It was shot on a Canon 5D3, (old school I know) with a 16-35 f.28 mark 3 lens and one Yongnuo 560IV speedlite with it’s trigger.

The flash was set on a stand at waist height about 2-3m behind the four lads, pointing back at me and tilted about 45 degrees towards their heads and higher. You can see it on this test shot I took as the guys lit their cigars. Flash zoom was set to 24mm (wide).

So if I just quickly talk through the camera settings again because like with all off camera flash you follow a process which is 1. Set your ambient exposure with the flash off, then when you’ve got that you turn on your flash and control its power to suit – and in this case for my ambient I wanted pretty much pure black, I didn’t mind the moon and the tiny bits of bokeh from the city in the background but essentially I just wanted a very dark image where pretty much the only light was coming from the flash. I thought this test shot was a tiny bit bright so closed my aperture from 2.8 to 4 and the power of the flash was set at 64th power.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a backlit smoking shot, I made one the year before but I wanted to try it again because in the previous one I used a coloured gel to make it blue and it was shot at twilight so was quite a different image, I wanted to create much more of a silhouette this time and with no coloured gels I wanted to try something in the edit instead which I’ll go through shortly.

A previous photo I made that I wanted to try slightly differently on this occasion

So now with my settings locked it was just a case of positioning the lads so the two in the middle were back to back and the outer two were facing into the middle and then asked them to take a drag and 1,2,3 exhale whilst I fire a few shots off. The first two were a bit early, the guy on the right not quite in time the second one again not quite right, it’s too busy on the right.