Central Park Shoot – with Rick Sammon and John Williamson B&H

Last month, thanks to B&H we were with Rick Sammon and John Williamson learning about lighting for two days. It was a nice day and here I’ll share some of the pictures that I captured and some techniques that I learned.

The first day was at the event space in B&H, we learned about the different types of lighting and what equipment we should use depending on what we want to achieve. Of course everything depends on the equipment that we have handy at the time of the shoot. You’ll notice that you don’t need a lot of equipment to get great images, the most important thing is to know how to use the tools that you have and master them.
The second day we went out to Central Park to test the equipment and all the techniques that we learned the day before.

Using a single reflector we can fill in the shadows. Let’s see what happens when we take a picture without the reflector:

The face of the model looks a little dark, and it’s hard to see her eyes. Let’s add a small reflector:

Now we have a nice illuminated face. It’s just that simple, with a small reflector we direct the light to fill in the shadows. This particular day was overcast and that was good because the clouds acted like a huge soft box making the sunlight very nice, soft and even.

Another images using a big reflector. Thanks to Joey Quintero for your help!

Since we were a lot of people with just two models….

… Jennifer and David from B&H decided to model for us…

And for those (myself included) who didn’t want to get into the mass of photographers to take pictures of the models, we decided to model for ourselves using a big (42” or bigger) umbrella with a SB-600 attached.
I was using my D40x with the SB-800 to trigger the flash; cameras above the D40x have TTL capabilities on the camera and can trigger the SB-600 with the pop-up flash with no problem. I needed the external flash to trigger the other one. Here are a couple of portraits of the photographers taken with this equipment:

Trying split lighting here:

And butterfly with Rebeca (need to work a little more on this one):

A fellow photographer, Fabian Cambero from Venezuela, was able to come to the shoot and he was brave enough to go into the crowd of photographers and take really nice pictures of the models; you can see his pictures here.

Here is a picture of me taken by Fabian Cambero with natural light: