Hi, this is Jay P. Morgan. Today on The Slanted Lens, we’re shooting a portrait of Randy with his ’66 Chevy. We’re going to concentrate on how to do a nice portrait of Randy and have a car doing sheet metal in the background. It’s all about incident angle and how you can get that sun to work for you on the side of the vehicle, then adding a little strobe light to open up his face and clean up the portrait. So let’s take a look at what we’ve got.
I’ve moved so that I’m on an angle incident to the sun now, so I get a nice painting across the side of the truck. As the sun drops behind that mountain, you’ll end up with a gorgeous highlight across the side. It will look fabulous. I see a great highlight across the side of the car. You can shoot these in direct sunlight, they actually look fabulous. But just as the sun breaks down below that horizon line, I’m now going to see that horizon line in the side of the car. Now the side of this truck rolls a little bit, the sheet metal does. So I might not see an exact line, but I could, depending on how it reflects the skyline. But it should look pretty cool.
We’ve got the sun going down. I’ve set my color balance to be shade, which results in a nice warmth all around him. The warmth from the hills, the warmth of the truck, combine to make this a nice, inviting portrait. I’m going to start out shooting about F11 to give me a great exposure for the sun that’s out here on the mountains, and shine it right at Randy’s face.
When I bring that light around to camera right it looks good, but it’s also very obvious that the portrait is lit because the light doesn’t match the direction of the sun. So instead I add it on camera left side where it follows the sun. This helps the portrait look more natural. It’s going to feel like it’s an extension of the sun as it lights his face and it will seamlessly light him. Some of those with the strobe opposite the sun look nice, but you’ll get a more natural look on the opposite side. It imitates the light that’s already there.
I switched over to the 15-30mm lens for a couple reasons. I really want to get a little wider shot, with more of the vista. I’m okay with the telephone lines in there. It’s kind of fun. You can see the road; you see the lines. I’m going to get in closer to him because I’ve got this wide lens and I can see all this stuff in the background so it will be fun to look at. So take a look at some of those examples, see what you think.
This was a lot of fun- taking a picture of Randy here with his ’66 Chevy. We used a lot of different lenses, a lot of different angles, we even moved the key light from right to left to give us different looks. There’s a whole variety of things we did today. They looked fabulous. It’s fun. We were on that nice incident angle to be able to get that sunlight on the side of his truck which really looked fabulous. So just some tips on how to shoot sheet metal and a portrait at the same time.
Keep those cameras rollin’, keep on clickin’.
-Jay P.