I generally have an order to the pictures I want to showcase here on this blog, but I don’t want to wait for this one. We had too much fun and the results were just so far beyond our expectations for a first attempt that I am just going to bump this one up to the front of the line. Not to mention we are using it in our new banner on the portfolio page so I might as well jump to this one now.
FLOUR!
Yes, flour. I’ve seen other artists use this for dramatic effect and after talking to my team we jumped right into it. Well no, that’s not true, we actually waited 3 weeks and then jumped into it. The first week I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing first and did a bit of research and then it rained the next 2 weeks but we eventually had a nice enough evening to do it.
All I am doing is having the model throw flour in the air as she jumps or does a dance move. Then I have two unmodified speedlights off to the side and back a little to light up the flour – its along the same premise as lighting up fog from a fog machine. Light must bounce off that flour to make it really appear in the photo. I also had a strobe with a softbox facing the model near where I was photographing.
Which brings me to where I was photographing – I was AWAY. Flour and cameras don’t mix well. So, I put on my 85mm lens and got at least 12 feet back. Same with my strobe, except it was about 10 feet back. So, you might want to take a moment to brush up on the inverse square law of light. You do not need to do the math, just understand what is generally happening there and compensate as you see fit.
Then it is just a matter of catching the model in the air at just the right time when the flour is in just the right spot. It did take a few tries to get each pose we attempted right, but we eventually got it down and got a lot of pictures we were happy with.
Four things to keep in mind:
1) Do this outside. If we had to clean up the flour because we did this at an indoor location, we’d have gone insane.
2) I purchased 4 bags of flour for this. While we used all 4, I could have managed with just 2.
3) We did this on a humid night when the grass was sweating. Both the models had to keep taking breaks to pull of globs of dough off their feet.
4) Again, flour will go everywhere, so you might need to hose down the area when done so your neighbors aren’t left wondering what all that powdery whites stuff and goo globs that are all over your yard are.
Regardless, this was a very fun photo session, and everyone involved was very happy with the end results.