Behind The Scenes: Shooting Models On Miami Beach

Guest writer, Julius Ise is a professional photographer based out of Germany. In January he traveled to the beautiful beaches of Miami. While he was there he called around to several modeling agencies to set up a shoot. This is a great example of shooting personal work. He was able to get some great shots for his portfolio while at the same time helping out the models at DecoModels.

We had the opportunity to shoot at Eden Roc, a beautiful hotel and resort on Miami Beach, as well as on the beach and the famous boardwalk. While the hair and make-up artist was finishing up on the models I checked the location to figure out the exactly where I wanted to shoot. I decided to use a simple one light setup with my Nikon D800 and the Nikon 50mm 1.4 for this shoot.

Instead of a heavy studio flash with generator I used a small Nikon SB-900 flash with a lastolite softbox. Had I not used a softbox, the light out of the flash would have been way too harsh. To compensate the loss of light through the softbox, I used the flash compensation setting (+1EV) in the menu of the flash. Because of the Nikon SB-900 I was able to use Nikon's CLS (Creative Lightning System) and i-TTL for high speed sync (HSS). Thanks to this set-up it was possible to shoot with wide open apertures like 1.4 and a faster shutter speed. With such wide apertures I only had a small depth of field and a nice blurred background. For most of these shots, I positioned the models with their back to the sun. Doing so allowed me to use the sun as a rim light and avoid distracting highlights and dark shadows on their faces. 

When you're traveling, you don't always have the opportunity to bring a lot of gear. For set-ups with more people or larger sets you would need more power than one small flash can offer but for portraits of one or two people, this set-up works out great.

See more images from behind the scenes on Julius's blog.

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