Photography Thailand Forum

[Marc Schultz]

I normally wouldn't post the commercial work I do for hotels becuase most of it is not so interesting to show to people, but I thought this photo was somewhat interesting at least in a multicultural regional context.

It is a shot I took in Dubai recently for the Shangri La hotel for magazine advertising of one of their restaurant outlets. What I felt makes it somewhat interesting is that the girls in the photo are from a combination of the Philippines, China and Indonesia, the restaurant is Vietnamese and, as I said, the shot was taken in Dubai. So it is a very multicultural image, although no one would know.

Sorry for the copyright logo at the top left, but since it was shot for a client I need to put watermarks on images if I am showing them at this sort of resolution.

Any questions or comments are welcome.

[Renato]

Hi Marc,
Nice shot, has there been any retouching done on this because the photo of the girl in front is so sharp, even the conical hat is perfect. Just curious. Everyone would love to have a photo taken like this one, how did you set up the shooting? I am still a long way to making this kind of shot (not commercial) but it sure would help to get some tips from you.Thanks a lot. Jingle52648

[Marc Schultz]

There has been a lot of retouching on this, but mainly to do with exposure balancing.

In simple terms what you might like to know is that the girl in the front is sharp and the ones in the back are blurred partially because of the wide aperture setting used on the camera, but I also sharpened the girl in the front in Photoshop on this low-res image whereas the sharpness of the girls in the back was left untouched.

As for lighting, it was shot using a mixture of ambient lighting in the restaurant, a bit of natural light from the window, and a couple of studio flashes. The ambient lighting helped to set the overall mood. Then a tiny bit of fill in flash was used in front of the girl from her right side. In addition, there was a second fill in flash used from behind the girl on her right as well, which is what is giving her that small highlight on her right cheek and along the edge of the food. The girls in the back are being lit mainly by a bit of natural light that is breaking through the blue window shutters.

When mixing 3 different light sources together it often takes a bit of time to get everything balanced just right. And if you are working with models you need to make sure that the shutter speed chosen, which is normally slow if you want to pick up some ambient light, is still fast enough so that you don't get blurry models if they move a little bit.

A tripod was also used for this shot.

[Renato]

Hi Marc,
Thanks a lot in explaining how you did this magnficent shot, I just have to read your advise again and again to remember how it was done. I am not a professional like you so I still have to learn more. However, I doubt if I will even try to do commercial photography at all.  I'll just stick to the easy one in the meantime. Thanks again. Jingle52648