One of the ways to light your subject when in the full sun, is to use a powerful strobe and a bare reflector. The hard light tends to compliment the scene and bring out the details. During this session, I used the Cheetah High Performance Colt 45 Reflector and the Cheetah CL600X strobe.

As you can see in the image above, this is a fairly simple setup. The strobe is 600ws and the reflector throws a ton of light. So much so, I had to dial down the strobe and shoot at about 1/2 power for this particular shot below. The series was taken around 10am and in full sunlight.

I placed the strobe/reflector about 8 feet from the model and slightly above her eye line. The light spread is wide and covers her from head to toe.The angle of the BTS shot doesn’t really show the best perspective. Although the C-Stand isn’t the lightest thing to move around on a location shoot, it was invaluable when it came to providing a solid foundation for the strobe/reflector combo.

In the shot above, my goal was to photograph Lisa with a shallow depth of field. I also had her placed with the her back to the sun. This allowed for a nice rim light on the hair. The Cheetah CL600X allows you to shoot high sped sync. I under exposed the background by 1/2 of a stop and then adjusted the output of the strobe to expose her as you see in the image above. The background is out of focus, the sky color is a deep, rich blue, and she “pops” from the scene. The exposure was 1/2500th a second, ISO 100 @ F/3.2 with the Canon 5Ds and Canon 70-200LII.

I hope you enjoyed this post, if so, be sure to leave your comments or questions below.

Thanks,
Frank

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Photography Lighting Diagram - Cheetah Colt 45