Model: Gemma Rhodes
Hair Stylist: Zara Vernazza
Make Up: Nadia Matoorian-Farrow
Shot in Hampsted Heath | London

Thank you to @EmilyDarcy for helping out & see the rest of the images here
http://ideasandimages.smugmug.com/Archived-Images/Gemma-R/

Set up:
Camera: Nikon D800
Lee Matte box + Tabacco hard filter + 0.9 ND Grad
Speedlight + Orbis
Sigma 105mm + 35mm

Frank | 3 Legged thing, Icelight, PW’s Godox speedlights all packed into my 1510 Peli which is great for keeping kit dry, as it did rain very hard during elements of this shoot.

The Lee Matte box is fast becoming my ‘go to’ tool for shaping light. This is for not only Landscapes but portraits too. Using the ‘hard’ filters to grade in camera is a super fast way to get the look you want. In the past, I would use the gradient filter tool in Lightroom to add the contrasts and colour, which is very good way to work, but if you want to cut your editing time down, shoot it right in camera, and really control the light then a set of filters is the only real way to do this.

Below you can see the effect of the Tobacco toned filter over the image compared to the unfiltered image. My normal set up is to have a soft filter coming in from the top then a hard filter coming up from the bottom to leave a brighter highlight across the main section of the image.

Left: Filter – Right: No filter

 

Since we was on location, we used speedlights to add the lighting highlights. as you can see by the image below, we added very light into the image, but was enough to just make the white dress white and ‘pop’ out in the busy setting. We used the trusted Orbis ringflash adapter to spread the light out and avoid hotspots on the white dress.

The final image had a CLUT layer added and a curve layer plus some light noise added back into the image. Photoshop cc14 + Lightroom worksflow.

We shot a mixture of styles during the day, with a number of filters to grade the images in camera. The portrait below was just shot with ND filters letting us get the settings we wanted while shooting on-location with ambient light. Sometimes you have to much light to shoot wide open, ND filters are great at controlling light with no-colour casts.

We shot these on the Sigma 35 1.4. using ND’s and Colour grads to let us control the light giving us the full control of the light at the same time as grading in camera. A warmer white balance was also used as was a gold reflector to give some extra ‘kick’ in to the image while keeping it all soft and natural.  Light was added into the image by firing the Speedlights into the reflector giving a very soft and wide light.

Here are some other shots from the day that have been converted into black and white using a simple gradient map layer

The image above was created to give a harsh- classic 1920’s beauty look using Speedlights fired though a diffusion panel. The softer more modern image was shot using same set up with a softer edit and feeling.