It’s always important that every photographer working for taxable income also does lots of personal work–as is the case with many getting new gigs from their creative side work. “In 2009, I quite accidentally shot my first fashion campaign for designer Olga Gromova, which at the time I worked as a director.” says Ivan Tsupka, a Ukrainian fashion and advertising photographer whose Construction series . “And gradually began to more and more work in the field of fashion photography. In the last two years I my work is mostly fashion photography related.” Part of this is due to his creative art project–which he describes as being very experimental.

For Ivan, he finds fashion photography to be a great place for him to experiment. Such is the case with his “Construction” series. “During the shoot I decided to experiment with a mix of continuous light and strobes, as continuation of developing my old ideas.” says Ivan. “The first time I did a similar project called ‘Flashing Lights’ in 2009, when I combined the available light in the night streets, and on-camera flash.” This time he tried to combine ambient lighting in the studio and studio strobes to create what he calls a Fluid Body effect.

Here’s how he did it:

My Sony HVL-43AM flash worked in stroboscope mode at 1/64 power, giving weak flash approx. every second. It was the trigger for three Profoto studio flashes with softboxes. As the shutter speeds was around 1.5 seconds it gives me 1-2 flash randomly during each exposure. So I get one or two sharp phases during continuous motion blur effect created by constant ambient light.

Camera – Sony A850,

Lens Sony 24-70 / 2.8 ZA,

Camera setup: f / 16, 1.6 sec, ISO 200

Lighting setup: Sony HVL-43AM as a trigger for 3 Profoto studio strobes with softboxes

I try to work with a small amount of equipment. Now I use a Sony A7R camera with standard zoom Zeiss 24-70. I prefer high-quality zoom lenses, because they give the opportunity to play with perspective in the process of shooting. I like to use the flash when shooting outdoors for a more vivid image. I like sometimes to experiment with unusual techniques and shooting light.

The editing of these images is simple colour correction in Adobe Lightroom.

Stylist and make-up: Ekaterina Nikitina

Model – Alina Savarovskaya

Hair – Sergey Cap