Hope you enjoy this weeks video. This week we bring to you Part 2 of our shoot with Ballerinas from the National Slovak Theatre! I tried to make things a little bit more technical for this weeks blog post video so let me know if you preferred this or if you liked it more casual! For those of you that are curious, the software that I used at the end is a nifty online diagram drawing sotware also known as Sylights who happens to also be one of our Von Wong does Europe partners. It’s a fantastic tool!

As mentioned in the video the setup is rather simple. The idea is to have a bunch of large but harsh light sources that rim your subjects from all direction. Front, side and back. There was no magical ratio for those of you wondering! It’s one of those feeling things for me.

When I build a lighting setup, rather than follow a pre-scripted formula I tend to build them in sets… so in our case, just having the first two soft boxes set up…followed by the frontal fill… followed by the rear speedlights! All in order 🙂 Depending on how many people were in the photo the lights would either get closer or father from our set, and depending on what I saw on screen we would make small or larger changes!

For those that are curious on the precise gear we used to create these shots:

  • 2x Linkstar 300 Watt strobes
  • 1x Linkstar 500 Watt strobe
  • 2x large soft boxes with grids
  • 1x large octobox with grid
  • 2x Nasty Clamps
  • 1x Nikon Sb-900
  • 1x Nikon Sb-800
  • 2x Nikon Sb-700

If you’re looking to produce a similar look to these shots and simply don’t have access to studio strobes, you can recreate a similar look if you have a lot of space and some bed sheets to create large soft panels of lighting. Depending on where you place your light in relation to the body, you’ll be able to have a more or less of a dramatic feel.

Check out the final results, let us know what you think. My personal favorite? This gorgeous one of Ana and Dominik.