SHANGHAI & PHUKET PHOTOGRAPHER | Salva Mendez

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Shooting on Location

Hola, here I would like to explain you how I took this picture for a restaurant manager in Shanghai.

I set the camera to kill all the ambiance light: aperture f10, shutter speed 1/60 and ISO 100.

Then I started to light the scene's elements one by one using a strobe with a 70cm diameter beauty dish with a honey comb to control the light as a main light source for the subject. 

For the champagne bottle I used a speedlite with a snoot to avoid the light run over my main subject. 

I found the left side of my subject too dark so I  used another speedlite with a snoot to get some rim on it but avoiding the light to contaminate my background because I wanted it quite dark.

Then to get some more light on the background wall I set a third speedlite with another snoot reproducing the original light in the restaurant. 

This was the making off setting:

In this sketch you can find more technical details:

If you want more details about the equipment that I use, please check the post "My Equipment" in this blog.

The edition should be pretty easy, just to correct some curves in Lightroom and small details like a shadow on the bottom right and some reflection on the wall, but I had a mistake and there was a table behind the table where we put the champagne bottle and that one was not even, so I had to remove it in Photoshop. Usually I shoot tethered with my laptop so I can check the result on location but in this case the restaurant was full of customers and I didn't want to disturb too much with more equipment so, my fault, I didn't notice the mistake in the table when I checked the picture on my camera screen. 

Here you can compare the image right from the camera and the processed one:

If you have any question feel free to ask me ;-)