Leila Music

I recently took a very short trip to London to photograph Leila Music.

As usual we had next to no time but as we were in the wonderfully vibrant East London, we found three very different locations within a stones throw from each other.

We were shooting on the street and moving quickly so my lighting package consisted of two Speedlights (one bare, one wih a shoot-through brolly), these were handheld by Uchenna, my fabulous assistant for the day.

On the canal and brick wall locations we were able to position ourselves in the shadows of nearby buildings, alowing us to get the most control over the lighting (in both instances the brolly as key with the bare SB600 as an edging light). When we got to the park location, I decided to soot nearly directly into the low sun to create a very different style for those images – The sunlight created a very appealing edging light and also provied some very summery flare bouncing into the lens.

Speaking of lenses, this as one of the first times I’ve used my 50mm 1.8 out of doors and I must say I am completely in love with that lens, such a marvelously shallow depth of field and incredibly sharp, even all the way out to 1.8.

We had just enough time to soot a couple of shots of Uchenna before we packed up, she wanted ‘dark-and-moody’, which we were able to get in exactly the same spot as the summery pics of Leila thanks to the marvel that is Nikon’s High Speed Sync  shooting at 1/2000 with only 1 SB600 in a brolly. I had to move the flash in very close to get the exposure up, but at that speed the ambient light hardly registered at all.