One Amber Gel, One Take: Behind the Katy Palma Session

One amber gel. One wine leather chair. One take where she stopped performing and started singing.

I've posted the stills from this session before — the ones where Katy is lit warm and low, chin up, giving the camera exactly what she meant to give. What I haven't shown is how it actually looked in the room to get there. So this post is the other side of that shoot: the setup, the light, and the video I shot alongside the stills.

The setup

Every session starts as two different problems dressed up as one shoot. The circle background — that soft, even glow you see wrapping around her in the wide shots — was built with continuous light. I wanted to see the falloff in real time and adjust it by eye before anyone stepped in front of the camera, which is exactly the kind of control continuous light gives you that flash doesn't. You watch the light change as you move it, instead of guessing and reviewing.

Everything else — the portraits, the close-ups, the frames where the amber gel does the heavy lifting — was flash. Once Katy was in position, I needed the kind of output and freeze that only strobes give you, especially with a voice like hers in the room; she doesn't sit still for long, and flash doesn't ask her to.

Shot the whole session on a Nikon Z6III. It's become my go-to body for exactly this kind of work — sessions that move between a controlled wide shot and a fast, in-close portrait rhythm without giving me time to think about the camera at all.

The take

https://youtube.com/shorts/khTDDLTuCZ8?feature=share

This is the part the stills can't show you. Thirty years behind the lens teaches you when to talk and when to stay out of the way. With Katy, it was the second one — the light was already doing its job, the room went quiet, and the best thing I could do was stop directing and just shoot. That's the take in the video above.

Why it matters

I put technique in blog posts like this one for the same reason I don't put it in the caption on Instagram — because some of you reading this are photographers too, and continuous-versus-flash isn't a trick, it's a decision you make every session based on what the shot actually needs. Here, it needed both.

Booking studio sessions now. If you want a session built the same way — a setup that's actually considered, not just switched on — book a session or find me on Instagram @whywphotos.

Featuring Katy Palma → @katypalma.music