Shooting Glamour Portraits from Home - Help and Tips + all 4 parts in 1 post

its not as easy as it seems, but here are a few pointers that everyone needs to keep in mind

The Model : its great if the model has a lot of patience (along with looking stunningly beautiful) and its an added advantage if she can do her own make up! otherwise its going to get difficult to find a make up artist last minute! 

Lighting : the key to photography is lighting. here i have used a combination of natural lighting and also 2 600 RT flashes with soft box mounted on stands, which were triggered with another 600 RT flash mounted on my 1DX and 5D Mark III bodies. 

Test Shots and Experimenting :  this is an absolute must! you are never going to get better unless you learn from mistakes. shooting in ambient lighting is pretty easy (and i have seen a lot of people make simple mistakes here as well) but shooting in controlled lighting is a different ball game all together. 

never get tired of experimenting and learning new ways to improve your photos using external light

Obstacles and Clutter in the photos :  as seen in the above 2 pics, the illuminated softbox in the frame is not desired. so the shot was redone till the desired result was achieved

Extra Hands - the biggest help for any photographer is help from friends whi act as extra hands. here i was super fortunate to 2 people. my close friends Shashwath Shetty for lending his apartment for the shoot and assisting us in every way possible and Rithesh Raghuveera from Ritz Lenz for capturing the behind the scenes moments which helped me write this blog and also assisting with the lights and different shooting situations

and finally all the 4 parts copy pasted here to maintain continuity for this blog post :)

4 parts - shooting Glamour Portraits from Home

Location hunting is a major pain , especially if its a last minute impromptu shoot.

normally a good location will have a nice uncluttered room for indoor shoots or a beautiful garden for outdoor shoots. and a typical place for a shoot would be a "resort" or "hotel" but not without demanding their pound of flesh. at one resort in Bengaluru we were told that a pro shoot would cost us anything above Rs 1 lakh! or if they had to charge per hour it would cost us Rs 10,000 per hour.



so i decided to take this as a challenge and shot at my friends home in Bengaluru where we used a combination of natural lighting, 3 external flash units mounted on stands with soft box and used his living room, bed room, elevator hallway, basement parking and outdoor garden (well not really a garden )

for the first set up

it was a bright afternoon and my friends apartment had a superb view at the 25th floor! i used a simple 2 light set up with the 600RT flash mounted on 2 stands with softboxes and trigger both the flashes with another 600 RT mounted on my Canon 1DX and Canon 5D Mark III.

the model was made to pose with the strong back light from the window acting as the third source of light (natural light)

here are some of the results

Part II - Glamour Portraits from Home - Hallway Elevator

for this, we were fortunate to again take the help of natural lighting , thanks to the very large window . here i decided to use 1 flash set up 600 RT mounted on stand with soft box , which was triggered using another 600 RT flash mounted on my Canon 1DX and Canon 5d mark III.



The model was made to pose keeping the natural light as a constant source of light coming from behind her.

here is the set up

the softbox was kept at a distance 2 to 4 meters from the model and i was shooting behind the softbox . for close up pics i used the 5d mark iii with Sigma 35 mm f 1.4 ART lens.

here are results

click here for Part 1 of Glamour Portraits from Home 


next update Glamour Portraits from Home  - Basement and Outdoor

Part III Glamour Portraits from Home - Basement and Outdoor

Basement shooting was a bit tricky as there was absolutely no good source of light and i had to use 2  600 RT flashes mounted on 2 stands with soft box.

this purpose of the shoot was to highlight the model and NOT the car. the car was merely used as a prop.

the trick here was to achieve a good hair light and so we had to make several modifications to the car seat to allow the light to fall on the models head.



one flash was always in front of the model, or camera right while another flash was kept behind the model at a distance and the flash fired pointing to the back of her head.

here is what the set up looked like

and here is what we managed to achieve,

for the outdoor shoot, we were looking for a garden. the apartment my friend stays in , is a typical example of a concrete jungle with just a tiny bit of land utilized for garden space.

the spot we chose in fact was not even a garden. it was the compound wall which had a bit of greenery , thanks to the bamboo planted there.

all the photos were shot in shade and i didnt use any other source of light, except natural lighting.

the set up

and the result

next update - Glamour Portraits from Home - Bedroom

click for previous ones Hallway Elevator and Living Room 

Part IV - Glamour Portraits from Home - Bedroom

not exactly Boudoir , but not too boring either. for the bedroom shoot i wanted to use just 1 600 RT flash unit with available lighting.

the 2 bedrooms we used had 2 different natural light options. for the forst one, we kept a 600 RT flash unit in the balcony at low power, while the model was posing in a long sweat shirt on the bed.



this is what the set up looked like

i used the sigma 35 mm f 1.4 ART lens on my Canon 5d mark III body + 600 RT flash used as a trigger to fire up the other 600 RT flash kept in the balcony.

here are the results

for the second bedroom shoot we decided to use the floor with a coffee mug as a prop.

we had to change to the other room, and fortunately the other room too had a very good source of natural light which we used to our advantage,.

the set up was

here we used the red thin curtains to add the extra tint to the next set of photos. in both cases the 600 RT flash was kept outside , in the balcony at less power (1/64) and the glass door and mosquito netting helped to diffuse the light even more.

the results

previous posts in this series

1. Living Room
2. Hallway
3. Basement and Outdoor

cheers and happy shooting!