Edgy Boudoir Photography - Natural Light Vs. Shooting with Strobes

Edgy Boudoir Photography - Natural Light Vs. Shooting with Strobes

Today I'm just gonna tell you about Boudoir photography and the difference between shooting it with natural light vs shooting with strobes so is personal preference and just depends on the style or the look that you're going for this was a fun shoot with my friend, Bridgette aka Chocolate chip, honey dip, so we just rented this little cheap hotel room that works pretty perfect. 

All I brought was one small single strobe with a rectangular softbox, but I also bought the ring light to show you. If you do like to shoot natural, then you can have a source of continuous lighting and use that For the first few shots using the natural light I put Bridgette in front of this window. I have my camera settings at ISO 800, aperture at 3.2, and shutter speed at 1/60 of a second. 

So when you're trying to decide which lighting, you want to go for it. You just have to consider natural light. Do you have enough light, Because if you don't have enough light today, you're gonna have to have a high ISO, which will of course give you more grain? But maybe you want more grain. Maybe you're going for some kind of little edgy film look you might want that. But those are just things to consider. Also, a little tipnorthern facing windows are gon na, give you the best natural light. For these shots. I used my 50 mm lens. I like that as a portrait lens, it's a little faster and opens up all the way.

I think A good rule of thumb to avoid the camera shake is to not set your shutter speed below the size of your lens. So I have a 50 mm lens. Soi, don't want to go below 1/50 sec and that'll avoid the blur from the camera shake unless you're using a tripod. So, of course, I chose ISO 800because. I was not using any strobes and I needed a little more light sensitivity and the 3.2. I did want a softer. Look maybe a little more blur. So in these photos, I had ambient light from the lamps of the room and then the window seemed to be a little bit cooler. 

So when you have different types of light like that, it's called light contamination um. I would have to recommend using a gray card so that you can custom, white balance and kind of fix that problem so for this shot same settings. 

So these are nice, they're Airy they're still sexy, but then I went and grabbed the LED ring light. So if you want to do continuous lighting, if you just have these lights on constantly and also depends on the type of light you're using if you're using a tungsten light, it's gon na be warmer, and since this is an LED light. These lights were very white, but they were nice, crisp, and clean. 

So, as you can see here with this light, it's a pretty bright light, but I still had my ISO 800, my aperture at 4 and I could go a little bit faster because this light was pretty bright. So this was at 1/80 sec. But then I moved her over and set up just one single strobe with one softbox. I also switched my lens to the 24mm-70mm I need, something a little wider, and also don't need it to be as fast, because I'm gonna have the power of the strobe, and because I have this throw-up. I can have my ISO down to 100, which is the lowest one because I'm gon na have the power of the strobe. I also closed my aperture down to f11 because I donated as much light - and I like doing that because now being at f11 I have a greater depth of field and everything's gon na be in focus sometimes if you want, sometimes you don't we want that. 

Really! Pretty-pretty blur in the back. 

Sometimes that can be tricky because if you get too much blur, you have to make sure you're still focusing on the face, sometimes I hear down too low, and depending on them, depending on the lens that you have you could accidentally, get the nose in focus, but not the eyes. It can get tricky around there, so sometimes I like being an f11 or something because. Then I know at least this is all gon na be in focus, but that's still an artistic decision. 

So I had my shutter speed at one 125th of a second. So it's gon na be fast freeze, my motion, so I like shooting like this because it's. I know everything sharp and then using only one softbox and not having a fill over here having these shadows, it's a little edgier and that's, just a style that I tend to like. So on this one, I brought my ISO to 200but. I also closed my aperture down to 13, so for this next shot, the settings were almost the same. 

I just brought my ISO up to 200 and I like how that's coming out. So we just did some more shots with pretty much the same settings I was just messing around, would change something here and there, but these are pretty much all the same settings, so you can see the type of style that I'm getting here and to me I, like It better it's a nice and, sharp and crisp, and if you look right here, you can even see how dark it's got so now, we've gotten into shooting into the night, and so this is where the benefit of having strobes comes in because it doesn't matter how much natural light. I have, or even the ambient light outside it doesn't matter, I'm getting all my light from the strobe.

 So that's a benefit you can shoot any time of day, but it went well Bridgette loved the photos here are some of the edited images. These are some natural light and then here are some of my favorites using the strobe. So, as you can see, it's really up to you to encourage shooting both ways anyway, so you can experiment and see what kind. If you like, please feel free to comment below with specific questions. If you want me to make another video on my editing or post-processing workflow in the meantime subscribe, so you can catch the next video. Thank you, Bridgette. I don't know what this is. Gon na look like..,