For this wedding, my second shooter and I decided that we would do a vogue inspired composite shot for the bride and her bridesmaids.
The idea is to light each of them with my MagBox 24" Octa individually and composite all 7 images back into the same, final image.
This gives me the ability to get really close to each person and have the ability to shape the light hitting them in a way that wouldn’t be possible if I were to light them from afar.
I used the MagBox 24" Octa with and the fabric diffuser, with a speedlight at 1/32 power to get nice, soft light on them.
(You could use something like the MagSphere and Grid as well to get more controlled light, with a slightly different look!)
For this next image, I used High Speed Sync (aka: HSS) and my MagBox in order to erase the distractions from my backgrounds. I enjoy using this technique when I don’t have much space, or beautiful backgrounds to work with!
The idea behind HSS is to give you the ability to override the shutter sync speed limitation when using off camera flash. When using Off-Camera Flash, your shutter speed is the most direct control of your ambient light. With HSS enabled, I can bring my shutter speed up to 1/8000 and get rid of that messy background you see in above the BTS shot!
Since the shoes were sitting on a mirror, I placed my MagBox with the Fabric Diffuser directly on top of the shoes in order to create a nice reflection from the mirror:
Esteban Gil is a Connecticut based wedding photographer, educator, and MagMod Ambassador based in Guilford, CT, USA.
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