I wanted to do a shoot with a fitness model, to try to capture not only the appeal of the model, but also the effort and determination required to become strong. I had in mind one of those sweaty, black and white type shots you see on Sports Illustrated covers from time to time.
The biggest win in this shoot is that I got to work with the amazing Susan Yen -- she killed it in both the posing department and the being-4000-percent-more-fit-than-I-will-ever-be department.
My plan for the lighting was to blow a gridded softbox across the plane of her face, fill with a shoot-through umbrella, and use a hairlight behind her to pull her off of the background, something like this:
It's awfully crowded in there...
I added a reflector to bring up her skin tone in the black and white images, so there was a lot going on in the studio that day. The key light and the hair light were firing in ETTL mode, with the key light at +1EV to account for the gridded softbox, and the hair light at -2EV. The fill light was on manual at 1/32 power. I really like the Yongnuo YN-E3-RT for its ability to manage different groups in a mix of manual and TTL modes.
I was shooting tethered into Lightroom using the low key black and white filter -- that filter was much too dark, so I'm glad I had the in-camera images. With the lighting set-up above, I ended up getting a good selection of black and white portraits, so we turned the hairlight around to be a kicker on the background and reversed the ratio on the key light and fill light, and took some more traditional portraits in color as well.
In my quest to get that "fitness" look, I somehow convinced Susan to allow me to put "fake sweat" on her. We painted one side of her with off-brand olive oil and spritzed her with a mister -- the beads of sweat really stayed in place well. I think we did pretty well capturing the original intent of the shoot:
The sweat is fake...
Eventually I burned through all 16 AA batteries I had brought with me, but we got a bunch of good shots. Take a look at the whole gallery and let me know what you think!