How to shoot strobe/daylight mix on a bright location by Sean Armenta
At least once a year, I try to produce a fashion shoot at The Joshua Tree National Park. An immense and varied desert location and it is one of those places where you simply point your camera at any direction and it looks amazing.
I put together a small team of one model, one artist providing both makeup and hair, a fashion stylist, and a photo assistant. I wanted to produce images that were classic, not overly trendy, and would remain relevant for longer than a season. I also planned on using two lenses for the shoot - a 50mm and a 180mm. Using a 50 would allow me to get just enough environment in the shot without being overly wide, and the 180 would be great for beauty shots and full length shots which would show depth and I really wanted to make it different from the previous outing to Joshua Tree where I had shot everything with a 35. The shots you see here were taken in April 2009, a bit off season to avoid all the usual tourist traffic to the park.
All these images were lit using a profoto B2 battery powered power pack and a beauty dish. It’s not quite the commonly seen “overpowering the sun” technique, but rather I wanted a nice balance between the ambient and strobe exposures. It does however, share the same process: work with the elements you cannot physically control, then add in the elements you have full control over. 
The approach I use when using strobe outdoors during the daytime is to first ascertain the “correct” ambient exposure. From here I make a creative decision of how I want the environment around the model to be exposed and deviate from the “correct” exposure accordingly. For these shots, I wanted to underexpose just slightly to retain a lot of background detail and to avoid blown out skies and highlights. Since I know I am shooting with strobe, I want to be conscious about my shutter speed so that I don’t use too fast a shutter speed resulting in my cutting off the flash exposure.
Shooting with a Canon 5D, using power packs, the fastest sync speed you can use wis 1/160th. Most of these shots were taken in full sun, between 1pm and 3pm with sunset being around 6pm; that’s a lot of ambient light to deal with! I decided to set my camera at 50 ISO to lower the sensitivity of my sensor so I could further bring my exposure down to compensate for my set shutter speed.
Target aperture was between 5.6 - 8 because I wanted to achieve some separation between the model and the background with a somewhat shallower depth of field. I knew I didn’t want to shoot it completely wide open because I still wanted to retain a sense of a recognizable environment. On some of these images I resorted to using a 2-stop ND filter on my lens to further underexpose the ambient exposure to my liking and to achieve my desired depth of field.
All that was left to do was to set up the strobe to light the model separately from the ambient exposure. I prefer to light on the opposite side of the sun when possible to maximize three-dimensionality. Once positioned, I measured and adjusted the flash exposure to match my desired aperture.
Even though we were in a rough and remote location, I was still able to shoot by my preferred method of tethered via Capture One to my Macbook Pro. 
shot by the LA based team of
- Photographer: Sean Armenta - www.seanarmenta.com
- Stylist: Leilani Lacson - www.leilanilacson.com
- Make-Up & Hair: Sharon Tabb - www.sharontabb.com
- Photographer’s Assistant: Chip Morton
