I was asked to photograph Isa in her prom dress. Of course I accepted. It was a perfect opportunity to take portrait shots with off-camera flashes. This is something I have to practice on. It was a pretty short 30 minutes session so once again I had to be able to think quickly.

I wanted portrait images where the subject would pop out a bit from the background. I’ve seen that it’s something you can do by using flash and make sure the background is a bit under exposed. This is a look I really like.

A mistake that I made was that I didn’t use the sun as a second light source. Common is to use the sun as back lighting to get nice rim or hair lights while the flash is used as the key light. What I tried this time was to put the subject in the shadow and use the flash as the single key light. This is also a common setup. But I would have liked to see results from both setups. The key light was setup in a 45/45 position, sort of. 45 degrees up and 45 degrees to the side.

Here are a couple of images from the shoot:

Overall I’m pretty satisfied with the results. I think I managed to make the subject pop out from the background like I wanted to.