Portrait Photography London

Portrait photography of Angellica Bell for Boots. An interesting set of challenges were thrown up with this one as the whole shoot took place in Boots’ flag ship Covent Garden store while open to the public.

This meant my lighting set up needed to be very mobile, slimmed down and as unobtrusive as possible. Normally I’d shoot with Elinchrom battery packs or the mains plug in heads with large umbrella’s and soft boxes – obviously with this being a live store I couldn’t have cables all over the place and I couldn’t be taking over large swathes of the store with light stands etc.

I’d recently bought a trigger system for my Canon Speedlight, which normally goes on top of my camera on events, and a very compact Godox soft box, all to act as a super mobile/train friendly little portrait set up.
I’m not sure why but I’ve always been a bit snotty about shooting portraits with speedlights instead of proper flash heads, not entirely sure why as they worked an absolute treat on this job.
The beauty of speed lights is they can be dialled down very low, so instead of trying to light the whole frame, you can just add little pockets of light where needed without completely killing off the ambient light in camera. As you can see from the pictures attached, this has worked a treat, was super mobile and easy to work with, chucked the light anywhere I wanted and the resulting light, if a little strong in the shadows, has turned out well. Will definitely be taking this on shoots more often now I know A. How easy they are to transport and B. How well they work when balancing available light in a frame.