Shoot
I did my shoot on the 22nd of January, and seeing that I only had time in between book-in times at the hotel I had to be efficient. We cleared out the room by removing the bedside tables which had a lot of stuff on it that wouldn’t fit in with the 1800s style, there were modern lamps and a kettle so that had to be removed. We also took a painting down from the wall for the mirror shot. I set my camera up for the main bed photo, I had a flashgun on my camera pointing up into the white ceiling, this was a good fill plus it set off the other flashes, because the trigger wasn’t working properly. I had a flash on each side of the bed aimed towards the model. It’s a really easy set up, but I didn’t want a very elaborate set up either. I had set my camera to 1/125 f/3.5 for the first bed photo, because I wanted a decent depth of field and I wanted the flashes to cover most of the image. I used a gold reflector for this image as well, as an attempt to light up the model just a tiny bit more from the left side of the frame, this made it less flat and it also added some nice colours to her face. I used my Canon 6D with my 24-105mm f/3.5 lens, because I knew I was going to be shooting in a fairly small room and that a wide lens would be the best option.
For the window shot, I had my camera set to 1/15 f/3.5 with a single flash on the camera. I wanted the shutter speed to be low for this one because I wanted to get natural light from the window and I also wanted to basically blow out the actual view. I know this resulted in some motion blur, but personally I don’t think it’s too bad, it adds movement, it’s like she’s being called for.
For the mirror shot I did two different set ups, I did one for the model on the bed where her back was in focus, and then one where their reflections where in focus. For the first one I had a flash from the right side of the frame aimed towards Nora on the bed, and one behind me aimed towards Torvald which lighted up his reflection. The other one had a light set up towards the front of Nora, which would shine straight down the lens, so I covered that with my hand to avoid lens flare. And then I still had the other one aimed at Torvald in the reflection, but from a slightly higher angle.
I freehanded the window shot, but for the mirror and bed shot I had my camera on a tripod with a Canon RS-80N3 remote switch to avoid movement. I made sure to take photos of the background without the models in it for the editing process.
