Having fun with gels

I'm always trying to get more depth into my images and looking for ways to do this isn't always easy. The lighting and angle of shooting is always your first port of call and part of the angle of shooting is down to the model or how you are directing your model. Garments can also give added depth, particularly if you can see layers.

 

In this shoot I was working with Lisa who as a model is particularly creative and unafraid and we decided that her only garments would be two or more gel sheets which she would hold in each hand and effectively dance with. The reason for movement was to allow the gels to be a layer between the body and camera or the strobes and body and background. This potentially gave several more layers as not only the gel was a layer it's self but the different light projected though it would also become a layer. All this layer talk is sounding like an instruction in Photoshop editing. :)

All this movement could lead to soft images of course and to make that even more likely I reduced the shutter speed to as low as 1/3s. This of course gave us two exposures in one. One being the time of flash duration that with the help of quite hard light froze Lisa and the other being the exposure time that caught the light passed through gels but not in the final position frozen by flash. The results were really good. Very little or no post editing was required and all effects and colour were caught in camera.