Male model shooting tips please

shabba

shabba

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Hello

Apologies if this is in the incorrect section. I’m looking to do a shoot with a friend of mine, he is in very good shape at the moment and wants some pictures doing – think Mens Health/pics to show off a good physique.

Anyway I’ve only had shoots with females, where it’s better to get smooth look to the skin, and such, so need some tips for lighting and such to get the best look from a male body. It can be outdoors or indoors, I have a Canon 40D with a 430Ex flash but no trigger so its camera mounted, and will look to use my 50mm prime 1.8 lens.

Would it be best to go outside somewhere with some but not full on light, like woodlands, or is max sunlight best? Indoors I know spot lights from above can give great shadows and the look of real definition, but I find these conditions hard to capture correctly.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
 
Have a look at the behind the scenes shots in here

http://www.flickr.com/photos/photosmudger/

Should give you a good idea, basically you need some strong directional light, then some photoshop.

On camera flash isn't going to show any definition, you really need some good off axis light. Ideally a fairly hard source too.

Go to Jessops and buy an optical slave for £12, that'll allow you to get the flash off camera if it can't be fired optically.
 
£12? Don't I need 2 parts, one on the camera and one on the flash, its more like £27? Sounds silly but I don't have the money for it right now if so.
 
The camera has a popup flash, does it not? You use that to trigger your off-camera flash with the £12 optical slave.
 
It does but how does that work, sorry for sounding stupid here. I thought you need a sender unit to connect to the camera flash socket, and then a reciever unit that plugs into the flash to trigger it?

How would the pop-up one trigger it? I don't want to use the pop-up one as well as a 430ex, just the 430.
 
Optical slave. That means when it sees another flash go off, it tells the flash it's connected to to fire.

You set the popup on minimum power, so that it doesn't affect your scene, but still pops your other flash.
 
the 450D can't work with an optical slave, it can only do TTL with the built in flash, not manual, which you need to use an optical slave.

Shabba, if you need to use your flash offcamera, get an ebay radio trigger, you can get a cheap set for about £15.

But yeah, hard light, sharpen in postprocessing, think about and research your poses.


edit: dayumn, that photosmudger dude's work is sick...
 
Ok, the 450D can't, but what about the 40D? that's what he said he had in his first post. :)
 
or just buy a cable to get your flash off camera. That way you get the benefit of your TTL metering if you are not wanting to experiment with setting your flash up manually :)

Defo off axis lighting and as hard as nails ;)
 
Sorry how can I get 'hard' lighting? I assume this indoors method is better than being outside then, mid-day say with the sun high.

I looked into cabales, none are long enough unless I spend £20+, again I know that is not much money but right now for me it is unfortunately.
 
hard lighting = point light sources, rather than a big light source.

if a photographer wants a big light source, which gives not many shadows on the subject, and minimises the harsh edges of any that are present, then they might use a softbox, or an umbrella, or bounce their flash off a white wall or ceiling.

On the converse, hard lighting gives harder shadows, more contrast, emphasises lines (eg abs and muscle edges), and is usually obtained by not using any softbox or umbrella at all, ie just using a bare flash - which is good news for you, nothing to buy! :D
 
Great thank you.

I'd assume I need to mount my flash from up above the model, shooting downwards to create the best shaddows?
 
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