How I Shot It: “Julie’s New Costume” by Nick Chao Photography

In the first installment of How I Shot It, Nick Chao, a.k.a Nick’s Photography on Flickr, explains how he captured such a great shot he calls Julie’s New Costume, one of several from the set of the same name.

“This shot is one of quite a few photos I have taken of Julia. She is my best friend’s sister and an avid belly dancer so the theatrics of her costumes are always interesting to photograph. This particular day was the first time we have had stable weather around here in a little while and we really got to slow down and set up a lot of the shots I wanted to get. After taking some closer portraits amongst the trees, the sun was going down and I knew we had to get some shots of her in front of the sunset. We trekked down the cliff and got to the beach with a few moments left before the sun went down…

I am using a Canon Rebel XTi with a variety of lenses (mostly medium length primes) and a couple of external flashes and reflectors. I started taking these photos with my 50mm f/1.4 but I felt like it would look a lot cooler to have more of the great background in it so I switched to my kit lens zoomed all the way out to 18mm. The idea for this photo had been brewing in my head for a while now (getting somebody at the beach near the waves with an off camera flash to light them up) and we were lucky enough to have the perfect light for it. I don’t have any light stands or real modifiers yet (ordered some for Christmas that should come soon) so I got a flimsy little tripod to mount the flash on and set it up a few feet away from her (Vivitar 285hv triggered with a cheap ebay pt-04 trigger).  This is the first time I have really used a flash in a setting with some distance between the model and the light and It was amazing how fast the light falls off when you move it away. Obviously, I could have set it to full power and it would have provided a good amount of light but in this situation I needed to be able to fire off a good amount of frames in quick succession. A lower power setting would keep the recharge rate faster and let me do that so it was low power and super close to the model. I know that for a few of the photos I had an assistant hold a semi-translucent reflector between Julia and the flash to diffuse it a little but it was rather cumbersome so we decided to let the flash go bare.

As for the settings on the camera itself, I used full manual. That’s pretty much the only way to go when using these manually adjusted off camera lights. I knew that I had to tame the brightness of the sky behind her so I started with a shutter speed of 1/200 which I kept throughout most of the shoot. The ISO was set to 100 since I wanted as little noise as possible and I worked the aperture up till I had a good balance of the flash and natural light. I have noticed when taking photos of people from a distance that if I use any ISO above 200, that the sensor noise would often mask the details in the subjects face (since the face would be so small relative to the whole frame) so always pay attention to your ISO and small details. Whereas if I am shooting a very close up photo of a person I can go 400 or 800 since the facial features are large enough to show through the noise.

We worked quickly and by the time I had gotten the first few photos, I knew that I had gotten what I was looking for. It’s really great when you can spend a long time photographing something and then finally at the end something clicks and you get the shot you have waiting for. After I said we were done, the cold hit everybody and we scrambled back to the warm car.

In terms of post processing, there wasn’t a whole lot done to it. I did a lot with the dodge tool lightening her up because she was a tad dark in the original. When lightening a part of an image with the dodge tool it tends to add some saturation to it as well. That isn’t always an issue but when you are lightening skin or some other color sensitive thing it can be so I found a good way to preserve the original color whilst dodging freely to my taste. All you have to do is duplicate the layer you are working on and do all of you dodging and burning on it. Then, you set the layer blending mode to “Luminosity” and merge it down with the original layer. This makes your changes to the lightness of the image but not so much the saturation leaving skin tones natural and not an unsightly orange or yellow. I also used a duplicate layer set to hard light (with reduced opacity) to add some contrast.

Shots like these are pretty easy as long as you sort of know what’s going on and how to get what your looking for… and if you have a model that’s willing to jump around a bunch till you get the right shot ”

I really want to thank Nick for taking the time to go behind the scenes and explain how he created these gorgeous shots.  Please visit his Flickr photostream to leave him comments, and watch a short video of the shoot as well.