Lighting A Public Place Quickly

This fashion shoot was a real challenge for me and I loved it! I shot this in the George V Hotel in Paris in the public spaces. We moved location within the hotel twelve times in one day which meant setting up and dismantling lights, moving them to the new location, getting the right light effect and always scheduling everything around the hotels schedule for their clients. Fourteen different changes in one day and fourteen different pics.

I scouted the hotel a week prior to the shoot with my assistant, snapping pics along the way of possible backgrounds, noting light readings so that on the shoot day everything was planned out. This photo of Angelina was the second shot of the day, a raining November day that's natural light reading was dismal. We put a pro foto flash head at a 45 degree angle to our model outside the large windows on the right (out of shot). We positioned the flash as high as possible and pointed the head down towards the model to emulate sunlight coming through the windows.

I wanted to keep the hotel's ambient light so the flash was almost a fill (the first couple of shots looked like a nuclear reaction - too much light). I shot at F5.6 on a tripod and at a speed of 1/15 second to expose the ambient light correctly. The doors remained closed which gave natural shadows like sunlight. We powered the flash down till we had a daylight effect and voila!! Our model was great, once the lights were set up the shot was done in under ten minutes just as the clients of the hotel were getting up for breakfast and we were on the move to the next pic. Wonderful day of shooting in a dream location with a wonderful team. Stylist Lynette Collins from Simply You, Make-up and Hair Paolo Baroncelli, Model Angelina from Ford Models and all equipment from the fabulous folks at Matphot in Republique Paris. Hope this info helps.
carla x
ps shot on my Leica M8.2 using a 35mm Leica len. Have a great week.