Creating golden hour portrait lighting using off-camera flashes

 

 

As part of Profoto's Ordinary to Extraordinary series, Lin and Jirsa Photography put together an interesting tutorial video on how to create golden hour light using off-camera flash units, in this case, Profoto flashes.

Using a Profoto B1 flash unit, photographer Pye Jirsa recreated the sun and golden hour lighting for wedding portraits.

To convincingly recreate the sun, the off-camera flash has to be several hundred feet away from the subjects in a realistic position. Moving the flash that far back allows the light to hit all of the objects in the scene in a similar fashion to the sun near the horizon. However, the power of the flash has to be very high for the light to be effective from that distance. Also, to get the warm glow from the sun that you get during the golden hour, he added two gels to the front of the Profoto B1.

With the Profoto B1 set up and shooting with a Canon 5D Mark III and Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, Jirsa captured images at f/2.8 with a shutter speed of 1/200s with an ISO speed of 1600. You can see him working and some of the images he captured in the video below. 

(Seen via The Digital Picture)