Last year I had my introduction to live shooting with Nadine on The Flash Centre‘s stand at The Photography Show. I still remember just how out of my comfort zone I felt at the time, shooting in front of a live audience in a blank, unfamiliar environment with a model I’ve not had experience working with previously. It was both one of the most stressful things I did last year, as well as one of the most exciting! Therefore, when The Flash Centre called me a few months later to see if I’d be interested in getting back on the stage this January for the SWPP convention, I figured it would be a great way to kick off 2015.

I think what I love most about live shooting on stage is the challenge of a plain grey background. Whilst not the most inspiring of set ups, its a great blank canvas to get creative on and it tests my creativity to come up with enough visually exciting content to keep a crowd entertained for 45 minutes! My first talk of the day focused on my work as a boudoir photographer and how I use light to enhance and flatter my clients’ figures. As a lot of my work takes place in the confines of the boudoir, I chose to show off the Elinchrom Quadra A heads and how they were brilliant for getting light into small spaces.

Our provided model for the weekend was Scarlet Duggan, who was an absolute pleasure to work with. Meeting only 15 minutes before we were due to get on stage and work together, we bonded over my favourite part of the pre-shoot (the suitcase rummage!) and picked out a couple of outfits that Scarlet would wear for my sessions over the next couple of days. We settled for a vintage inspired black and white satin dress, followed by a black beaded crop top and monochrome tartan jeans.

For the last month or so, I’ve been playing with a one/two Quadra head set up using strip lighting to create highlights down the side of the body. Its a great technique for creating atmospheric lighting and highlighting curves. I played around with the positioning of the lights in relation to Scarlet, moving her backwards and forwards to change the intensity of light down the sides of her body. My favourites are the ones with only one half of the face in light with the other half in shadow. Below are a few more from the live shooting session after a small amount of post production in Adobe Photoshop.

During the convention I also played around with the ELC Pro 1000 heads, which will be up on the blog soon.