Halloween has just passed and for this year I wanted to do something a little different to the "douse a model in blood" type shoot. (I have already done one of those this year, but that's beside the point..). I just wanted something.. different. Not studio, not an abandoned house. Just something, else. After a little searching, I found that you can actually rent out churchs for the night and stay in them too just like a hotel room! It was that little something different I was looking for!

The model for this shoot was Vix (TheInkedVixxenn on Insta), and once I put the church idea forward to her, she sent me over a photo of a purge illuminated mask she had to shoot in. Now we just needed to make it work.

I wasn't sure how bright the mask would be but knew I'd probably need to mix flash and natural ambient light to get the shot. But, to what extent..? Basically, the church was DARK. It was around 6pm when we got to shooting this setup and with the church being located in a pretty rural location with no street lights, and the interior being light by around 18 battery operated candles, you can imagine the light we had to work with was minimal at best.

My main considerations were increasing ISO but maintaining a relatively clean image, getting a decent depth of field, and getting the actual glow of the mask to show. (This was my XH2's first outing on a proper shoot too!)

The first step was to get an exposure. I was thinking 1/60th would be in the ballpark, and the flash popped too. This was the result.. Not mask light showing! (Vix is wearing a dressing gown because it was freezing!!)

I switched to 1/5th of a second, ISO400 and f5.6. then added flash on a super low power. (flash would be needed to freeze the model with long shutter speeds). The results were still "meh" at best. But it gave a point to work from. 

The mask needed a longer exposure or higher ISO. I opted for a longer exposure. First trying out 1/4 second. As you can see from the shot. the mask exposure is alright. I shot with a beauty dish and added a grid to it.  As you can hopefully see from the test shot below, the main light stops at the chest area. This was intentional not to get much flash on the mask (and reflections). In the final shots Vix took a step forward so the mask recived a little more light, giving us a sharp mask. I added a rim light and background illumination light too as background needed some light pop too otherwise this may aswell had been shot in a black studio!

We were close,  but I still wanted a little more though. I dropped the shutter speed to 1s which gave the background exposure I was after. I gelled the lights too and started to feather them/angle the, to their final spots. Dragging the shutter for a full second on front curtain sync was giving some experimental looking shots, but nothing to be excited about. I then switched the camera into rear curtain sync and started to add intentional motion into the shot. 

With rear curtain sync, you have to be mindful of where the subject will be in your frame as the flash fires at the end of the exposure, and once the shutter opens, the viewfinder is just black! So this requires a bit of guesstimation.. 

The final shot is below. Shot at ISO400 / f5.6 / 1s with rear camera sync, we have the mask illumination and ambient light from the windows dragging across the scene.

Here's essentially what the whole setup was, minus the mask. I don't remember flash outputs, but they're pretty irrelevant. Just know the beauty dish was around 1/64th (low power).

That's all there is to it! A nice little experimental shoot and something a little different I got to shoot this Halloween, and in a location I didn't think would be so easy to access!