She wanted to do twirls in her dress, so we went with that. I had a light overhead for a few of them so I had her peek up a few times and photographed that. Finally, I changed the lights up again and had her do some standing poses and one last twirl. This didn’t involve hours of prepping her or anything like that. She just came into my studio as she was, she worked with that, and we had a blast.
Yes, it helps if your subject spends time prepping for a photo session, but it doesn’t always have to be mandatory. One of the amazing things about the human experience is that we can look great after countless hours of preparation, and we can look great with only a few seconds of preparation. It really depends on the circumstances.
This lighting test had me moving things around. This was more of just playing with the lights a little bit but all of them involved just two strobes. In all cases one strobe had a standard reflector on it and the other had an octagon softbox – it was all a matter of where they were. In the first shots the octagon softbox is overhead and the standard reflector is acting as a rim light. For the last three the standard reflector is off to the side acting as a fill light while the octagon softbox acts as a key light. These two different setups do very different things with the light and shadow.