Location session with Kamil Al-Hinai

I have always loved my photos to be taken in interesting places, allowing me to create a photos that break the monotony of the black background. For how much I love the peace, calm and flexibility you can get in a studio, location sessions are those I love more, those I am able to gather the best out of myself, or at least this is what I like to think.

This time we had the pleasure of having four very good models and in this post I will talk about the experience with Kamil Al-Hinai, a very talented model and mentor for younger models. Fabiana and I met Kamil during one of our Shaping Lights Workshop and we immediately saw his great attitude, his professionalism and the all the qualities that make a great model out of a person. We were also very fortunate to find a very kind, gentle person in Kamil, a trustworthy person we had the pleasure to meet outside the set as well.

Some weeks ago we had the possibility to shoot in a very nice pub in London, The Distillers, near Smithfield. The pub is very nice and has some interesting features, like some peculiar walls, that made the session fantastic. Unfortunately I was not able to gather as much part of it as I wanted, especially because the external light dropped so quickly when we got there that I barely had the possibility to get a glimpse of it in my shots. Lesson learned!

Despite the small flash used, they were at max some old Nikon speed light, I am pretty happy about the results. Some of the glory of the pub has been lost in translation, but still I like I have been able to gather few of the elements of it, pushing things in my frames. Technically, using a space different from a studio with out settings, presents various challenges. The physical space to set the lights is sometimes trivial: you don't want to sacrifice a specific element, but you cannot put it into the frame because the soft box covers part of it, or simply there is no space for you to push your angle a little bit more. Adding to this the fact that the flash has some serious power limitations force you to open your aperture to the maximum and wait for the power to charge much longer than in a studio. Yes, it is trivial, but it is worth the challenge.

I have always be a little bit envious of those images taken inside fantastic places flooded with natural light. One reflector and a flash just to fill the shadows and it is done... well, it is not going to happen so easily here in London, at least not in December, but in the end being flexible and capable of adapting to different settings and situations is something that I like, and that I think pushes my limits, making of me a better photographer.