A good magician never....

People say that a good magician never reveals his or her secrets and maybe photographers are a bit like that. But in reality part of becoming a good photographer is learning how to de-construct the creative process of a colleague to take part of that as an inspiration to create our own art.

Lately i have been getting a lot of questions about one specific image of mine and how I managed to either comp a landscape background in there or to shoot that outside while controlling the light so well.

The reality here is that I did not do one or the other. I tend to prefer shooting than spending my time sitting in front of the computer editing and if I have the way to make the magic happen in camera I will because it feels so good and saves a lot of time.

The image I am talking about is this one:

All I can say is that I shot that inside a room not bigger than 3x3 meters and that the image is straight from camera bar the normal colour adjustments that a RAW image needs.

The sea line is actually the edge of a piece of BLACK PERSPEX believe it or not. and the sky is a white paper roll lit by a speed light with a blue gel.

The fact that the perspex is black is what cuts out some of the luminance of the blue and generates that nice darker shade that seems to be the sea.

This was one very fortunate accidental discovery while I was shooting another image of the series in which I kept getting this strange line in the background that I could not explain and that upon discovery I had to sort in a different way.

As a welcoming present i will leave you here with a very crude and basic phone camera photo of what my set looked like for this photo also I would like to say to all that the more you shoot and put yourself out of your comfort zone, the more happy accidents that occur and the more you get ready to solve problems on the fly when you are on a real job.

Just like any other martial art.

The speed light with the gel is under the table. On the left was my Key light acting like the sun. And one of my favourite pieces of kit on the hot shoe acting as a trigger, the Canon 90ex flash that they sell for the Eos-M. it is bad to try to light anything but it has master trigger capabiilities and can control three external speedlights optically.