Saturday Photoshoot at Dragon's Teeth

Shot this past Saturday with wolfpup, a Model Mayhem member I met through fellow photographer Allan of iCandy Maui.

I had originally intended to use a White Lightning 1600 strobe to try to overpower the sun, but unfortunately ran into some problems with my Vagabond battery pack while testing it the night before. This left me with using reflectors and my Nikon SB26s for lighting.

For the first setup at Dragon's Teeth in Kapalua, I had the model wrap some sheer fabric around her and try to get it flowing in the breeze. She had to struggle with the 10 yards of material (I bought too much of it), but managed to do it after several tries. It's harder than it looks, especially while trying to balance on sharp jagged rocks, and she really worked hard at it. I was really impressed with the results we got once we got it working.

For lighting, because I wasn't able to overpower the sun, I ended up using the sun as my main light and a California Sunbounce silver mini on a lightstand to fill. Didn't have any sandbags so I used a couple of big rocks to hold down the lightstand.

We then changed up the look a little. We wanted to see how the red kimono and sword would look against the sky.

The rock formations at Dragon's Teeth really lend themselves to cool shots. I think I might want to do a future shoot there with maybe a sci-fi theme.

We were a little pressed for time as I was booked for a wedding later that afternoon, so we headed to the studio in Kahului to try and do a few studio shots.

This was setup in the storage room adjacent to the studio. For her main light I setup an AB800 in a beauty dish in front. For the back light, I mounted an AB800 on a C-stand and boomed it above and behind her. To this light I added a 20 degree grid and a 1/2 CTO gel then carefully aimed it so that it hit the back of her hair.

Really wish we had more time to work together as we got some pretty good shots from this session.