Those who’ve been following me for a while, now that I’m a big fan of the “covered shade technique” aka the “afdakskestechniek”. Basically this means that you place your subject out of the direct sunlight and prevent light coming from above. When I get on location, the first thing I do is often to look for a spot where I can use this technique.

So that’s exactly what I did when we needed some nice light, during my 1 day Motivational Light workshop at GPP Fotoweekend. With the picture on the left we got the added bonus of some direct sunlight hitting the light colored floor in front of the model. This light is reflected back up and fills in whatever little shadows left, very nicely. It also puts a nice second catchlight in the eyes. Joe McNally seems to be a big fan of this kind of light too and refers to it as “floor skip” if I’m not mistaken.

The picture on the right, is taken one or two hours later. The main light remained pretty much the same but the sun moved around the building and that left us without the fill light from below. I always stress out to my students that in order to light something, you first need to analyze and understand light. So in this case that means that you need to recreate the direct sunlight, reflecting off the floor in front of the model. Just one bare speedlite pointed at the floor, was enough to recreate the light we had in the first picture. Can you see that these two pictures where taken in substantially different light?