I’ve been meaning to try out colored gel photography for a while. I’ve taken a few stabs at it here and there but with this shoot with Sunny and her boyfriend Beejay, I wanted to give it a proper go and really create something solid. They’re are both DJ’s here in Seoul, so it felt like an appropriate time to get colorful.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a location shoot for fun. Sunny manages a club in Seoul called Villain that we were able to shoot in during the day. Behind the stage there was a red neon light so I knew this would dictate my background color. I did add an extra flash to really fill in the space with red and brighten it up a bit. I messed around with a couple of colors for the key light but settled on blue, and used an orange side light to blend the background in a bit better.

The palm trees in the background were painted white, which allowed them to catch enough blue light to bring them out from the red, adding a little texture and depth. I made sure to shoot at a wide aperture to keep it all nice and creamy. I ended up having to manual focus because it had to be dark in the space to be able to shoot at such a large aperture, and the camera wasn’t focusing reliably in those conditions.

For anyone who cares about the technical side, I shot these on the Fujifilm X-T2 with either the 35mm f1.4 or the 56mm f1.2. I was using a couple of Godox flashes, but had to use an old Canon one as my background light because I currently only have 2 Godox flashes, so I was running 2 different trigger systems at once. Here are a couple of behind the scenes shots my girlfriend got as she was assisting me that afternoon.

I’m hoping to do more of these shoots in the future and experiment with some more colors and subjects and really develop my skills and style.