One Light, One Photographer: Shooting Dramatic Portraits Without An Assistant

I’m a team player. I like collaboration. I thrive on the meeting of minds and ideas and creating as a team. For weddings, I always have a second shooter with me, but for portraits, I usually shoot solo. I also don’t use much off camera flash so I don’t usually need an assistant because I work fast, the kiddos have short attention spans, and I don’t want to be bothered with schlepping a bunch of equipment around because it’s heavy. Plus I’m kinda lazy when it comes to these things.

In the following video from our friends at The Slanted Lens, Jay P. Morgan takes off to blustery Maine to shoot some dramatic portraits of fishermen, with one light and no assistant and he shows you how he does it.

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Jay P. shows us his ‘Run and Gun‘ set-up which consists of a a Photoflex Triton on a stand and an Octodome with a grid. He hangs his extra batteries on the stand as weights along with a portable sandbag so the whole setup won’t blow over in a gust of wind. Shooting with a Canon 5D Mark III and a Tamron 24-70mm 2.8, with a second backup Mark III and a Tamron 70-200mm 2.8 lens attached to his hip with a Spider Holster, Jay P. used ambient light as the fill and the strobe as key and used a PocketWizard to trigger.

You can see Jay P.’s camera settings and read more about the shoot over on The Slanted Lens blog here. Below are a few of the images that came from the shoot.

CREDITS: All photographs by Jay P. Morgan are copyrighted and have been used with permission for SLR Lounge. Do not copy, modify or re-post this article or images without express permission from SLR Lounge and the artist.