Dietlinde Ambos is a local hat designer here in Karlsruhe and she has some fantastic work. Originally I had several models organises for this shoot but that kind of fell through but “Bella Chuppa” saved the day.
The shoot concept was very simple Head shoulder photos with a variety of hats but I needed to keep the lighting constant. My lighting set up was a very large octobox (160cm) in close and above the model as key light, a 60×80 softbox coming from below as a bit of fill for the eyes and hat rim and to strip lights behind Bella as rim lighting and separation from the background. The only thing to change during the shoot was the background, we switched between a white and black background to match the look of the hat. Due the the invers square law and no light falling direct onto the background it has a slight grey look.
As is often the case I was joined by another photographer for my Monday night shoots, fellow lightGIANTS Tobias aka Mr Burns shot the night away with me. Although I tend to shoot portraits at around f/4 to f/4.5 that would have been way to narrow depth of field to appreciate the hats. So we shot at f/13 – 1/125th – iso 100 almost all my images were shot with a Zeiss 85mm 1.4 tethered directly to lightroom.
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