Take a peaceful rural setting, a camera and a pretty girl and what can possibly go wrong?

The light!

Lighting is by far the most single important factor in photography and it's the one thing that we can't rely on and can't control on outdoor shoots - or can we?

Brilliant sunshine, especially near dawn or dusk, can produce a wonderful light, but it takes a lot of luck for it to be in both the right direction for the background and the right direction for the model too. The trick with location shoots is always to choose the background and then try to control the lighting on the model. For closeup shots this method can sometimes work well enough, just using a hotshoe flash or two - but hotshoe flashes have very limited power and an even more limited range of light shaping tools, so although fill flash is pretty easy to create, strong lighting isn't - and light powerful enough to overpower strong natural light is impossible without spending a fortune on a whole bank of hotshoe flashes.

So, on this shoot, I took the Safari portable flash with me, knowing that 600 Ws of power and a beauty dish would be more than enough to cope with even the brightest sunshine.

But the sun didn't happen. The weather was dull and overcast and the natural light could only produce this kind of lighting - flat and boring!

With landscape photography, unsuitable natural light is just as big a problem but it can be solved just by waiting for a better day, and shooting at the right time of day, when the light is coming from the right direction - but it's more difficult when a model has been booked, the location has been hired and shots need to be produced to a deadline, and anyway I had a video crew following me around, shooting a documentary about me, so we needed to have a backup plan - studio flash that will work outdoors - and that's why I took the Safari kit with me. Your own shoots may involve more or less people and more or less organisation, but the ability to control the light is equally important on every shoot.

If I'd had just a little bit of luck with the weather, such as hazy sunshine, I might have put something like 1 stop more light on the subject than the light on the background, but as the ambient light was so uninteresting I decided to crank up the power on the subject and underexpose the background by about 2 stops.

The ground was uneven and hilly and my model, Lauren Jackson, was finding it difficult to strike dynamic poses in these fairly demanding conditions so I decided to go for fairly static shots.

Let's make a start with this shot. I asked Lauren to sit on a rock at the edge of the stream, look towards the light and to look pensive. Lighting-wise, this left me with a bit of a problem because the only place the light could go was right in the the stream itself, but that's life!

As you can see, the light from the beauty dish is lighting her whole body and has created a fairly strong shadow. But, unlike some of the later shots, I didn't want the light to be too harsh, so I used my favourite tool for this situation - a silver reflector, placed close enough to lighten the shadows on her back but far enough away for the lighting on her front to be quite a bit brighter.

As you can see, I placed the Safari pack in the relative dry and the beauty dish was fairly high, to create the kind of light direction that evening sunlight would have produced. The picture below left shows the actual height of the beautydish.

We tried one other setup with Lauren in this dress, this time sitting on a wall, waiting for the wind to catch her dress, which didn't take long...

Because I wanted really hard lighting here to emphasise the sexy black leather dress, the lighting for this shot was more frontal although still off to the side and high, and no fill was needed because I wanted to draw attention to her face and her billowing skirt, so wanted the lighting to be fairly harsh.

Lauren then changed into her slinky black dress. I used the beauty dish on this shot too, but further away and at even higher power. I asked the model to hold the same position while I moved around until I found a viewpoint that showed her right arm, lit by light that had passed behind her. She's wearing the same dress here as in the  natural light only shot, but it looks much sexier here with a bit of help from the lighting!

I did think about moving her away from that overhanging branch but decided that it was better to keep the dry stone wall and the hill in the shot than to lose the branch. I also thought about getting rid of the yellow in the top corner, but I feel strongly that shots used for tutorials and articles should be completely unretouched, so I left it as shot.

And finally, I tried another shot, with Lauren opening a shotgun that had just been fired, to capture the cordite smoke and  - if I was very lucky - to capture the empty shells as they were ejected. The shot didn't work as planned because, concentrating on opening the gun, she found it difficult to maintain the right angle - but I think it's worth showing you the shot anyway, because it demonstrates the value of flash for freezing movement.

As it happens, I did manage to capture the shells as they flew through the air, the flash from the Safari was brief enough to freeze the cordite smoke and to almost freeze the very fast moving shells - some degree of movement blur is essential to make the movement look real.

Basically I took this shot because I could - the location is a licensed shooting ground, so it was legal for a non-shooter to handle a gun there under my supervision. Asking a slim, lightweight model to handle a 12 bore shotgun safely and cope with the heavy recoil is a big ask, so as I had an assistant who understands firearm safety I asked him to fire the shots in the air, hand the empty gun to Lauren and duck out of sight behind the tree while she opened it to show the smoke.