Commercial Photography Project with Models

Commercial and Advertising Photoshoots projects with models is my favourite photography work.

I really enjoy organizing the whole package. From contacting models, working with the client, to pulling the whole project together. This isn't easy especially if the client is on a budget and the models are freelancers. The reason is because they tend to either lack experience, can't pose or are not as professional. However, once in a while, you do get some models who are good.

I've shot Ashton (shown here on the right) a few times before and she is very professional, beautiful and poses well. Here, she is backlighted with a blue-green gel that enhances the imagery with a beautiful aura of "intelligence" if you will.

Lighting is very important. When the space for the shoot is large, the lights will need to be ultra powerful. You'll need at least a 1200 True Ws lights, preferably, something even more powerful, such as a 2400 True Ws lights. This is due to the inverse square law for light where the light falloff is rapid. If you are using medium or large format, your light usage will be even worse. Just be sure not to break the circuits too often. ;-)

On top of that, your lighting pack needs to be flexible enough to go into low power without changing its light temperature as much. I know for a fact (Yep, I personally tested them) that just about all monoblocks lights have a horrible shift of color temperature (300 to over 1,000 Kelvins) between max and min power. You probably don't care about such shifts if you are doing casual fun photography but it can be incredibly frustrating if you care a lot about the colors, for fashion or product photography. Imagine shooting a white product on white background and you see a yellow-orange tint on one side of the product and bluish cast on the other. Yuck!

Back to the point, lower power is needed to enable shots such as those on the left where the screen of the monitor's glow is important to be captured while you still want some lights to illuminate the background and fill the shadows.

- MS