Last weekend, I finally got a chance to escape city life for one day. I met up with my friend Elizabeth, an aspiring actress, singer, model and a student of kung-fu (although, she’s modest and probably wouldn’t tell you these things). Together, we drove to a beautiful mountain area near Evergreen, CO for a practice photo-shoot.

As I’m still learning about photography, especially portraits, I wanted to experiment with some strobist (off-camera flash) techniques. I brought a pretty bare-bones setup with me – my trusty workhorse Sigma 500DG Super, a cheap Yongnuo YN460, a light stand and a white shoot-through umbrella, which I ended up not using. I used Yongnuo RF602 wireless triggers to sync the two flashes. Most of the time, I shot with only one strobe, and for some shots I used the second flash for backlighting. Of course, the sun also acted as a pretty substantial light source in itself, when it wasn’t hiding behind clouds.

I set all of my camera settings manually, so it took some trial and error to get the exposures right. Overall, I’m pretty happy with some of the results I got. I particularly like the more dramatic shots with a darker background and I think some of the cave shots came out quite well. Ideally, I would have liked to have a reflector to smooth out some of the shadows; perhaps, next time.

Elizabeth, being a good sport that she is, was very patient and willing to experiment with various poses and set-ups. We weren’t going for anything specific – I just wanted to play with lighting and Elizabeth wanted some fun photos. Clearly, I still have much to learn and I’m excited to start doing more of such shoots to sharpen my skills.