In a recent Fstoppers video focusing on fashion photography, Patrick Hall walks us through how he uses strobe lights and LED constant lights to create a whimsical set of fashion portraits using long exposures. The creative portraits came out excellent and in the video, Patrick walks you through every step of the way.

Mixing Strobes and LEDs for Fashion Photography Portraits

In the video, Patrick is using the new Tamron 35mm f/1.4 lens on a Nikon D850, some colored LED panels, and a few cleverly-placed strobe lights. The shoot was sort of a fashion/sportswear mix with “a lot of motion and color.”

For the LED’s, Patrick used Falcon Eyes F7 Pocket Lights. Patrick wanted to try to use these lights instead of using gels on standard lights, but the one thing about the Falcon Eyes is that they’re not very powerful. So the first thing Patrick does is try to blackout as much light from the shoot as possible using some handy-dandy V-Flats from V-Flat World. Eliminating most of the light in the room allows Patrick to get his exposure perfect.

Patrick also pulled out a Profoto B10 to use as his main light on his subject to achieve that nice “freezing motion” he’s going for. The LED is going to burn the model’s image into his sensor and produce a nice motion blur effect from as she moves around.

The images Patrick gets are stunning, and honestly, really cool to look at. The kind of effects he can achieve with these clever lighting techniques and a little editing software magic is incredible!

If you’d like to see every step Patrick takes to achieve these kinds of effects, check out the video above. These techniques can be used for much more than just fashion photography and we’d love to hear about any experience you’ve had with clever lighting in the comments below!