Dark veil – experiments with high contrast and motion

During the photo shoot of  the Dark Queen mask, I decided to play with a dark veil given the strong wind of that day.

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I actually wanted to experiment with wind and capture motion in other photo shoots, but unfortunately weather didn’t help that much, but the scenery, the weather and the concept was shooting this time were perfect.

The model is wearing two type of fabrics, a dark veil covering her face and a velvet-like fabric that serves as a cloak. Given the high contrast between the snow and the dark clothes, I ensured that the sun hit the model from the back to be able to capture all the textures of the fabrics in motion, otherwise I would have gotten flat images, like if I had used a built-in-flash.

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I also shot the camera with an open aperture (around f4) and high speed, to separate the subject from the background and capture all that movement.

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I had some help from a friend, who was bouncing light with a reflector to the model’s face, however, that didn’t make much difference, since the sun wasn’t that bright that day and the bounced light wasn’t brighter than all the light reflected by the snow.

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Since exposing photos with snow is a bit challenging – you usually get texture and detail in the snow with an underexposed subject or a well exposed subject on a white background, I decided to underexpose the photos (shoot them a bit darker) and adjust the images digitally with Adobe Lightroom.

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