Wushu Exponent Tao Yi Jun

Former SEA Games medalist and Tai Chi Quan exponent Tao Yi Jun was the subject for this Wushu portrait.The original idea was to shoot in the evening against the backdrop of the lit buildings in the Chinese Garden. but after the initial recce a week ago, I decided to do it in the morning.(Apparently the buildings don’t light up except on festive seasons)

more pictures and behind-the-scenes after the jump.

I had 2 shots in mind going into the shoot. 1 dynamic/spontaneous action type shot and 1 more reserved portrait of Yi Jun. Having watched too many Hong Kong martial arts movies I really wanted to do the “showdown in the bamboo forest” shot but unfortunately for me, NO SUCH THING HERE ! ( I could be wrong) Anyway it was during the recce that I noticed these patches of yellow bamboo around parts of the Chinese Garden and added 1 more shot with the yellow bamboo as a backdrop. Yi Jun was a great sport and stood where I told her to despite having the giant red ants crawling around the branches overhead. See the setup shot below

Put the Canon speedlites in a cross lighting layout with shoot through umbrellas as diffusers and fired away ! ( shot on 16-35mm wide angle to get more of the bamboo)

The following shot was actually the first location of the day. I put Yi Jun under the shade for this shot and underexposed the background before lighting her again with 2 speedlites ( 1 with shoot through umbrella on camera right and the other bare flash on camera left in line with the subject) Put the flashes on full power to compensate the small aperture used to slightly underexpose the background. ( The sky wasn’t too impressive that day so I retouched it in PS)

By 10am that morning the sun was already bearing down on us full blast but I had to take one more action shot. Moving on the last location, the sun was coming from up and behind the subject. Using it as a sort of rim light, I switched over to the AB800 with a 22inch beauty dish as my main light.
Heres a pull back shot of the setup.

Shot for another 20 mins and we were done for the day ! Quick and Durrty !!

View more of the shots taken that day on my Flickr account here