Shoot Notes: Rebecca Buchanan Sunset Rooftop

I had set out to originally do this shoot with the gorgeous Gabrielle Romanello! As LA would have it on a Thursday afternoon however; she got caught in traffic and was running late.

Well as we all know the sun doesn’t wait for anyone. Not even me! Fortunately I had agency model Rebecca Buchannan, who I had been shooting earlier and we’d shot a stunning and the most sexy boudoir shoot she’d shot.

So I dragged Becca up to the roof of the building we were shooting in and the race was on to beat the sun. The first step since I hadn’t actually attempted this was to get the exposure for the ambient light correct.

This can sometimes be a challenge for light meters and sometimes it’s best to use your in camera light meter. I knew that I wanted to shoot at f4.0 with my 70-200mm f2.8 lens. The question was shutter speed.

As you can see in the above image I blew out the background completely. There is no color or definition to the sky.

All in all YUCK!

So how do you compensate for that? If you said shutter speed you’d be correct. If you said ISO you are also correct. Either of those things will help.

I dropped the shutter speed to 1/60 kept the ISO exactly the same at 400 and the above image is the result. You may be able to see that it’s a little bit darker than the previous image but not by much.

Also; it bears mentioning that it was also getting darker as we were losing the light quickly.

You can see the changes coming. To be fair I was really playing with settings to see where I might want to be. But at iso 400 I knew that my camera was still way too sensitive to light so I had to bring that down considerably.

I ended up landing at a final setting with the strobe included to light Becca of f4.0 1/180 iso 100. On the strobe I was using my 28″ collapsible or as they call it collapsible beauty dish that I will do a review on a bit later.

I hope that you find this information useful. Please let me know what you think of the final images above. Also please do not forget to check out my photography tutorial YouTube channel. Hopefully you’ll subscribe to it; and like my videos.