Workflow stories: Dryad, Nature and Light

Hello my Sweethearts!

As promised I'll share another story from my working process. As an example I decided to use this specific photo (it was a little challenging to shoot it) )

This time it'll be about shooting outdoors and light!
As you all know, shooting outdoors is not an easy task, if you are not used to it and it's not your speciality. So big respect to all Masters who know how to do it properly, as they forged thier skills throu mistakes and enormous patience. Especially patience - bad weather, insects, timing etc. - so many hardships! )

I've known a photographer, who was and is an embodiment of persistence. There was one speciffic shot he wanted to make. Difficulties were: only one day in a year, during one specific early morning hour there were all "sun conditions" to make it. By the way, that place was about 100km from my city. I don't know how many attempts he made and how photo looked in the end (it was in 2011), but heard that he made it ) Beautiful story of professional dedication in my opinion!

For my Friends, who are not familiar with photography, but appreciate all efforts spent, I'll share with basics I use in my workflow. ) For my respected colleagues, if you'll have some tips on how to improve shooting outdoors, don't hasitate to share in comments )
So my basics are: "Golden hours" (or Magic hour), reflector, "smart shadows", backlight and good DoF(depth of field) of your lens.

Golden hours - one hour after sunrise and one hour before sunrise (varies on season). At my place sun in summer stays long time, so we have a bit more time. Golden hour is the time when sun brings soft diffused light.
Dryad was shot in the evening, overall shoot took 4-5 hours. We started when sun was pretty high and ended at dark )

I always use reflector outdoors. This basic device helps to highlite model's face and body, bring spark in eyes and remove green color reflection from leaves on model. It's always sad to see good shot without proper light with heavy shadows and green color all over the face, ahhh...

Smart shadows - Just shadow pattern from trees and plants on models body and face ( to focus on certain part), also shadows that draw background.

Backlight is very important. I try to use sun light as main backlight source in most of shots as you noticed ) Soft sun light gives beautiful profile and adds "space" or "volume" to the shot: particles in the air, reflections from objects and lens etc.

Good Depth of field. DoF is the distance about the plane of focus, where objects appear sharp in an image. It varies to each lens, due to different aperture and sometime production technology.
That's how it works: the more you open aperture, the more light you have - less objects will be in focus. The more you close aperture, less light you'll have - more objects will be in focus.
Wide aperture brings beautiful Bokeh (blurry part of image or  the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image), which adds more depth and "volume" in photo.
Actually this part of workflow is very complicated and brings up too many things to discuss and talk about )
I have an old camera and two not expensive lenses (only good enough is 50mm 1.4, which I use mostly outdoors) , so this part of topic makes me sad. ) Because no matter what you say about individual skill, quality and specific shots lie in  lands of expensive cameras and lenses. Sad but true )

Photo you saw in the post and your Rewards is the combination of all steps I use in my workflow. Like exactly as I wrote)
I can't say that they(basics) are working perfectly, because every shot shot is different. You always need to reuse them differently. For example:

In this shot we used mixed light. Sun as a main light or key light, softbox as filling light, another lightsource as backlight ( we used orange filter to "imitate" sunlight) and reflector to make partial accents.
And I used lense with large DoF to have more area sharp, but with low aperture. That's why I needed extra light )
We even broke some branches on nearby trees to make this shadow pattern on model )

This was a small story from my outdoors workflow, which turned out to be a small master class, hehe )
Hope you liked it and I'll try to bring more this kind of stories in future )
If you have specific topic or question that you wanted me to talk about in my stories, please write me in Discord )

Have a great weekend and please stay happy!


P.S.: By the way, tomorrow  I'm going to another city to shoot our Shani photoshoot. It'll take 2 days, and my assitant will try to post in Discord about our progress (if we'll have opportunities).
Hope everything will go according to our plan!