Surreal Fashion Photography: Alien Worlds

Inspired by the landscape, Karl decides to do a shoot with the theme ‘Fear’. Working with a theme can really inspire you and drive you to even better results in such a scary and intimidating landscape. Again Karl attempts his levitation shot.

Comments

  1. Elsewhere this platform advocates CGI and the doom of photography. Why not CGI the background and composite the model shot in a studio? And save thousands of £$ ?

  2. Another fantastic image Karl, this whole series is a real knock out of the park home run. Beautifully shot, excellent location and the instructions perfectly stated. The images are just “out of this world”. Well done to the entire team, just goes to show what is possible when you have an excellent team and everyone is onboard.

  4. Rewatched this as it is one of my favourites. I have a question about the positioning of the two smaller paras. It looks similar to when you used a graduated filter and thus needed two different power settings but you don’t use that for this shot. Can you talk briefly about why you placed the big para in the rear and the two smaller ones where you did?

    PS: I first watched this on a tablet and this time I used my gaming PC (which has a ridiculous audio setup). The music is really well done in this video.

    1. To clarify I am a bit confused by the vertical comment and the fact that the big one is considered the “main”

    2. Hi Martin, first of all let’s study the image in more detail on a bigger scale you can view it here https://karltaylor.com/dtsc7eonibah3jjclrlzek8yy2otgi if this doesn’t load find it in the ‘people’ section on this website. You will see that the key light is on the face in the direction she is looking, this is coming from the Para 222. The Para 222 is such a big light that it lights pretty evenly down her whole body on my camera left, it also puts some light on the floor which I liked as it gave the feeling that it could be a search light from one of the ‘alien’ tripods. On the right side you can see that her blonde hair is lit and also her leg and knee. As these were from the 88 paras one is doing the top half and the other doing the lower half and I can choose if I want more light at the top or the bottom half. This is also useful as if I were to use the ND Grad then I could punch more light in just on the top half.

  5. Hi Karl, amazing video!
    In the “walking” pictures do you use single or continuous focus mode? Or perhaps prefocusing??
    Thanks for your work!

    1. Hi Javier, thank you. I always use manual prefocus for this type of thing and then I give the model a spot where she needs to make the turn or action.

    1. Hi Pradeep, yes the Hasselblad can sync at any speed as it is a leaf shutter. So I’m able to block out a lot of ambient light by shooting at higher shutter speeds here.

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