Pink SUNSET SHOOT with Rachelle Wilde + Light Setup
The stunning Rachelle Wilde shot on the sun kissed beaches of the Dominican Republic. We had just wrapped up a long day of shooting in the jungle and were making our long trek back to the resort. The sun had just set over the horizon and the sky turned a soft pink. It was beautiful so naturally the photographer in me had to stop and shoot a few pictures before the moment slipped away. Definitely glad I did these were my favorite pictures of the day.
Rachelle Wilde https://twitter.com/rachellewilde
The lighting setup for this shot is pretty simple but for those of you who are new to flash photography I can totally understand how shooting something like this can seem pretty daunting. There are two key things to pay attention to when shooting with flash at sunset.
The first thing is power you want to make sure that the subject and the background are properly balanced. If you blast out too much power the subject will look brighter than the background because the relative light reflecting from your subject will be brighter than the relative lighting coming from the background. If you are shooting with the flash in manual there are two steps you have to take to get the right exposure. First you expose for the background with the flash off. Second you turn on the flash and gradually increase the power till you get the result you want. On the other hand if you are shooting ETTL turn your flash on and then adjust the flash exposure power up or down till you get the right exposure. Keep in mind that you are shooting in a low light environment so if you want to expose the background properly your ISO will have to be high and your flash power will be low.
The second thing is Kelvin temperature. The flash will fire off a light that is close to 5500k which is daylight at high noon. Let’s call it white light. However at sunset the light is a lot warmer and closer to 3000k or orange light. If I were to shoot the model with straight flash she would appear to have blueish skin tones. The trick as you can see in the behind the scenes image is that I used an orange gel on the front of my flash. This changes the Kelvin temp. of my flash to more closely match the ambient light and create a more balanced color tone.
Ideally in this situation I would have loved to have a pink gel to go with the flash as it would have matched the color of the ambient light better. Rachelle had a bit of an orange tone to her skin that I had to fix in post production. It’s not often you find yourself on a beach with a 6 time Playboy cover model and a sunset that happens to be perfect. We only had a few minutes to get the shot and we nailed it.
Shot with an EOS 5D Mark II + EF 24-70mm f2.8 L + 580EX Flash
f3.2, 200/sec, ISO 2500
