Portraits of Sachin Khona

For the past 6 weeks I have had the pleasure of working with the photographer Sachin Khona.  Sachin divides his time between London and Vancouver, where he is establishing his wedding photography business. It has been a great collaboration, with Sachin learning more about the theatre and corporate world of photography and him showing me some of the latest trends in wedding photography across the pond.

One of the targets we set ourselves was to develop our portraiture skills and both of us were very keen to start using the beauty dish. I have been using it a lot this past week, and I wanted to show you a few of the images from our first session. We set up the dish in the studio and photographed each other, trying different techniques. I found you have to be very accurate with the beauty dish, a few millimetres in the wrong direction and you lose the impact, but I was pleased with the results.

The beauty dish was to the front and about 40cm above Sachin, and there was another bare flash behind him angled towards the backdrop. I used my Canon 5D with my 50mm F1.2 lens set at F5 with an ISO 250 and a shutter speed of 125th of a second.

This was taken on the same camera and lens at ISO 100, F8 1/125 sec. The beauty dish was 45 degrees above Sachin and there was no other lights used. I love the way the beauty dish creates a contrasty yet soft light, making lovely shadows on the face.

The beauty dish was in the same position for this image and the Canon 5D Mark II was at ISO 320, F5 with 125th second shutter speed, again the 50mm lens was used. Usually the 85mm F1.2 lens is my glass of choice for portraiture, but with the beauty dish it is important to place the model's face very close to the front of the dish. As a result there is a flash stand between you and your model which means having to get closer in than I usually would, that is why the 85mm was less useful.