Shooting Portraits with Elimchrom 175 cm Octabox as back light and plain background

I have received a lot of requests to do a quick post of shooting portraits with a white background (backlight and plain ) and so have writing this post. FYI this might not be the text book way of achieving the result, but as long as it works for me and the client is happy, its fine :)

The Elinchrom 175 cm Octabox is one of the best for shooting portraits. the 175 cm is really large and gives soft, diffused lighting to the subject. 

in this quick post, i want to show u some examples where i have taken advantage of the large 175 cm size and used the elinchrom 175 octa as backlight and even as a plain white background

Shooting outdoor portraits using the Sunny 16 rule with 1 light set up

Shooting outdoor portraits using the Sunny 16 rule

i was fortunate to attend a workshop on "Understanding light" by my mentor Dr. Krishna Mohan and i wanted to know the best way to get portraits using an external light source in broad daylight. thats when Dr. Krishna explained the "Sunny 16 rule" to us.

and a few days later i was able to use what he taught us at the workshop pretty effectively.

The primary purpose of this shoot (for me) is to darken the backgrounds and mainly focus on the subject giving it a dramatic look with 1 light source. (at the workshop we used an external speedlite) when we use a narrow aperture like f 16 at 1/125 shutter speed at ISO 100 , without flash/strobe, the resulting image will be very dark. at such situations adding light from a flash or strobe will only illuminate the subject/model at close distances keeping the backgrounds dark. so the subject 'pops out' in the photo.