AUTUMN LIGHT

Recently I had the joyous experience of shooting with Sophie Ryleigh. I'd seen her pictures floating around the internet and felt like doing something beautiful after all the weird horror stuff I'd been shooting lately. So I contacted her, we got chatting and planned a shoot in the woods near to where she lives.

I wanted to try some natural light photos, go for a Jessica Drossin kind of thing. Then leading up to the shoot I saw an advert on TV with a light bulb in it, and my plans of a natural light shoot went out the window. I'm not really a natural light photographer anyway. I like my photos to have that epic movie poster look and flashes help to achieve that.

So armed with four speedlights, a few lightbulbs and various camera based things we made our way into the forest. We tried a load of different things. Her holding a light bulb, then holding two light bulbs. There was an attempt to climb a tree at one point. We did some pretty cool stuff, but things got really interesting when we tied a light bulb to a piece of string and hung it from one of the branches. I then put a flash behind the bulb to light up the bulb and her face, and one right behind her as a backlight, then one about twenty metres away to light up some more of the forest and to look light another light bulb hanging down.

We managed to take about ten good shots before it started to rain so much that it was hard to ignore. We got the money shot though.

I then photoshopped out the stand the flash light was sitting on, added some falling leaves and a red filter and bingo, awesome autumn based photo achieved.