richhinton

After chatting with Rebecca at a previous shoot I discovered that she would really like to do a shoot with her partially submerged in water and after discussing the idea further we decided to do a shoot at a lake in Cannock with Rebecca  standing half submerged in a red dress that she owns.

The idea was simple, yet it was one of the more tricky and also more fun shoots that I’ve done to date.

The lake we used was about a 15 minutes walk away from the car park, through pretty dense tree cover and over about 20 small bridges over brooks and streams.

The idea of placing flashes on light stands in the middle of a lake and having to keep wading out if I wanted to make adjustments didn’t appeal, so I enlisted the help of two Voice Activated Light Stands (VALS) in the form of Rebecca’s boyfriend and cousin.

The initial set up took a while as I got Rebecca and the VALS to walk around in the lake to find a section at the right depth.  Which in the end meant that Rebecca had to kneel down in some rather nasty mud and pebbles.   It was pretty hard going for the VALS too as the bottom of the lake wasn’t solid at all and if they stood still for more than about a minute they would sink into the mud!

After about 15/20  minutes trying to get the lighting levels and placement of the lights right we ended up getting some very good shots.  The only issue with the shots was that there were a lot of bubble on the surface of the water caused by getting the model and VALS churning up the water while trying to get in to the right position.  Roll your mouse over the first image to see before and after editing shots.

Here’s a setup shot to show the placement of the VALS and lights.  Both flashes were at 1/4 power.

One useful bit of advice I was given, which I’ll share with you is to take a bottle of fresh tap water with you if you want to get your models hair and face wet, as it’s not very nice for them to have to use stinky pond water!   It also cheers the bored VALS up when you ask them to pour a bottle of cold water over their cousins head.

Another downside of doing a photoshoot in a lake is the amount of mud at the bottom of it!