A swimwear photoshoot with studio flash equipment

In the evening, I met my model at a lake in Southern Germany for a splash photoshoot. The links in this blog post are affiliate links. I receive a small provision when you buy something via these links; however, that does not cause you any additional cost.

One of the final photos

This is one of the final photos:

Flash equipment

At the end of this article you can find a list of all the equipment and where to get it. To create this photo, I used portable studio flash equipment. I used the ELB 500 TTL Dual to go Set.

This includes a battery pack so that no electrical connection is required.

I placed my flashlight just in front and to the left of the model and equipped it with an Elinchrom Rotalux Octabox 135 cm. The octabox requires a Rotalux Speedring, which has to be ordered additionally. You also need an adapter for mounting the speedring on an ELB 500 flashlight. Furthermore, a lamp tripod not included in the ELB 500 TTL Dual to go Set is also required. I used a Walimex Pro WT-806. I placed three sandbags on the lamp tripod to prevent the wind from smashing my octabox. I recommend sandbags from California Sunbounce. Moreover, you need a transmitter for firing the flashlight, for which I am using a Skyport Transmitter PRO for CANON.

The making of

This picture illustrates what the scene looked like. Elena is wearing her clothes in the making of photo because I forgot to take that one while she was wearing swimwear.

The following picture shows my battery pack. I almost set it to full power:

Camera body and lens

For this photoshoot I used a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. If you don't want to spend that much money, you can use an EOS 850D or an EOS 90D instead. The lens that I used was a Canon EF 70-200mm F2.8L IS II USM. The lens that I used was a Canon EF 70-200mm F2.8L IS II USM. This lens is large, heavy and expensive, but it does take great photographs. It allows apertures up to 2.8 at the entire range of 70-200mm. Furthermore, it has an image stabilizer. A more recent model is the Canon EF 70-200mm F2.8L IS III USM.

The final photo

This is one more from the final photos:

You might notice that the shutter speed is 1/1000 s which is much shorter than my camera's maximum flash sync speed. This is possible because the ELB 500 flash supports HSS. For this photo, I set the camera to manual mode, the aperture value to 3.2 and the shutter speed to 1/1000. The ISO value was 100. How did I figure out these parameters? First, I set the camera to aperture priority and chose the value 3.2. To check, I did a test photo without enabling the flashlight.

However, that doesn't really look good. The background is far too bright, and the model is too dark. Then I reduced the shutter speed so that the background looks good:

The background looks good in this photo, but the model is too dark. So, in the next step, I activated my flash.

A splash photo

This is one of the splash photos. For this photo, I used a much shorter shutter speed to freeze the water drops:

A photo with a reflector

I removed the softbox from my studio flash for this photo and equipped it with a standard reflector. The advantage of a reflector is that it reduces the flashlight to a lesser amount than a softbox. However, it produces a hard light, and you might notice the hard shadows in this picture. Furthermore, I equipped my camera with another lens - a Canon EF 24–70 mm f/2.8L II USM.

The making of

This picture illustrates what the scene looked like.

More swimwear photos

You can find additional swimwear photos in my swimwear photo gallery.

Summary of the equipment