Montreal photographer, Ben Von Wong, an Fstoppers favorite is at it again with his latest shoot. The folks over at Nikon sent Von Wong a Nikkor 400mm f2.8 lens to shoot with. Typically with a large lens you would shoot nature or sports, but not Von Wong. He decided to test the lens using the Brenizer Method. He took several portraits of musician, Andrew Kesler, on top of a rooftop, but one problem presented itself. How to light Andrew in the middle of the night on such short notice? In typical Von Wong ingenuity, they chose, an iPhone.
"For the second shot, we had Joel hold an iPhone and stand behind Andrew to give him a nice fancy back light. In the front, Deidre held two iPhones to light both face and body. By placing Joel [the voice-activated light stand] a little bit farther back and having Andrew move forward, thanks to the light fall-off Joel could become effectively invisible! The final result?"- Ben Von Wong
The photos are pretty impressive being illuminated with only a few iPhones in their flashlight mode. If you want to read Ben's full post you can find it here: Lit by iPhone, shot with a $10,000 lens.
Also, if you wish to try out the Brenizer Method for yourself, you can check out Ryan Brenizer's step by step instructional video on his website: http://www.ryanbrenizer.com/2011/05/brenizer-method-instructions/
Was doing something "similar" lately using iphone flashlight mode to create multi exposure photos in pitch dark moving the model around and creating ghosts of him.
iPhone lighting is genius, but its hard to see a special advantage to Brenizer method for background lights. It only seems to be different than a standard WA shot because you move the focal plane around.
I've been using flashlight apps on smartphones as off-camera flashes or lights for a while now. Nothing new under the sun.
I need to try it...