Portrait photographer Miguel Quiles is always looking for creative ways to make his portraits even more unique. In this video, the Sony Artisan discusses the gear, camera settings and techniques he used to create this unique image of model Fanta. Watch to learn more about how he got the shot with his Sony Alpha 7R III and Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 G Master lens. Subscribe to the Alpha Universe YouTube Channel for more.

Sony Artisan of Imagery Miguel Quiles discusses the gear, camera settings and techniques he used to capture this unique portrait of Fanta.

Gear & Camera Settings

Miguel took the image with the Sony Alpha 7R III and Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 G Master lens at 150mm. He was also using both the Sony HVLF45RM and the Sony HVLF60RM flashes. He chose an aperture setting of f/3.2 for the ambient light. “I chose that aperture because I wanted to have a little bit of fall off in this shot,” he explains. So I wanted to get the eyes sharp. But if you see in this portrait, her eyes are sharp, a lot of detail on the skin and around that area. But if you look at this eye in the back, you’ll see that it’s kind of falling out of focus. That’s cool, that’s something that I wanted to happen. It was an artistic choice and the way to do that is shooting at f/3.2.

He continues, “My ISO value was at ISO 100 and shutter speed here was a 1-second shutter speed. Not that’s not very common for studio portraits, normally you would be at 1/60-sec or 1/125-sec. Something like that. In this case I did a 1-second exposure, so I dragged the shutter and kept it open for much longer. And the reason for that is I wanted to get this light. You see in the back you’ve got this green haze of a light. In order to get that effect, you have to drag the shutter. You have to have the shutter open for a little bit longer than what you might think.”

Using Light & Motion To Get Cool Effects

His main light was the Sony HVLF60RM inside a silver umbrella above her pointing downward. Then he had a silver reflector underneath and in front of her to soften the shadows and add highlights, creating depth and making that nice beautiful light. He shot the image in Front Curtain Sync at the 1-sec. exposure. When the flash goes off, it freezes the subject and anything else moving within the frame will appear to be trailing. 

“I wanted to create this green hazy type of effect that kind of looked like smoke,” Quiles explains. “So what I did was I took a second flash, the 45RM, and what’s really cool with these Sony lights is they actually have these built-in LED lights. So I had that LED light off-camera pointed at Fanta. And I cut a small piece of a gel and put it over the light to change the color of it. I left the gel light on constantly the entire time. So that green light you’re seeing in the portrait is the HVLF45RM with the gel light.”

Once Quiles saw the flash go off, he took his camera and started shaking it around. Once the exposure was done, you can see that she is detailed because the flash froze her in the image. Then he got the light painting effect from the movement of his camera. “Depending on how you move the camera, it’s going to give an entirely different effect,” he says. “So you’re going to need to take a lot of these photos because each time it’s going to give you something different until you get the shot that you want.”

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