What a fun time on Saturday! At least I had a great time, and I’m sure Debbie and Olivia did as well. Friday night I got an e-mail saying our model for the day got called in to work, so we had to make other plans. Thank you Maria for filling in! I had photographed Maria a couple years ago for her senior pics and it was great to shoot her again. Our focus for the day was to have fun, but to learn more about our cameras and learn how to create sharp images. I feel like so many photographers have some great ideas in their images, but they missed the focus. With the increase in ease of accessibility for entry-level DSLR’s so many people are jumping into ‘photography’. Unfortunately people think they can stick their camera on ‘Auto’ mode and shoot away and get amazing results. There’s more to a great photograph than just a ‘great’ camera. Anyway, since it’s cold in PA, I chose to keep us in studio for our shooting, so we got a little studio lesson thrown in on the side.

For our first setup, we had a gray seamless background and placed the model about 4 feet from the background to allow for a little spill onto the background. The first image on the left is with one light with a beauty dish modifier placed in front and above the model off to the side. You will notice in the first image that there is a deep shadow under the model’s chin. We then proceeded to talk about reducing the shadow. We didn’t want to completely eliminate the shadow or else we’d have flat light and remove our element of dimension to the model’s face. So we added a 48″ sliver reflector just underneath of the model to bounce light back up to her face (as seen in the middle image). We could have stopped here, but while I was demonstrating lighting we continued to add a light to the background to show how you can change the levels of gray, and then I added a strip bank behind the model to give an edge light or catch light on her hair and shoulder to create separation.

Below is a 100% crop of the last image above to show the detail and sharpness we were producing.

We then moved to a white seamless. We started by lighting the background with two strobes on either side. I had the model standing about 12 feet from the background and snapped the first image to demonstrate the concept of setting up your lights 1 step at a time. Now to cheat a little since I don’t have a large studio with lots of extra strobes laying around, I had the model move back to be just in front of the two back strobes so there would be some spill on both sides of her face (as seen in the middle image). Then finally we added our key light in front and above the model to produce the image seen on the right.

The next two images are my two favorites from the day. I didn’t do a whole lot of shooting, because I wanted Olivia and Debbie to get most of the shooting in. I would only take a few shots to demonstrate lighting and focus. The image below in my opinion is a great representation of a basic posing rule, “If it bends, bend it”. Often times in portrait work, and I know I’ve been guilty of this in the past, but we learn and we grow, but often you see in a pose where a girl is sitting down her elbow can appear dislocated as it is straight down.

I just love this shot of Maria. When a girl has fantastic complexion, I love to bring the hair off the face on the side that has the key light. This really helps draw the visual to the beauty of the face. I’m immediately connecting with the model when I see this image, it’s like she draws you in.

We were fast approaching the end of our workshop and I wanted to get to some more post processing tips, so Olivia wanted to jump in and get a few pics with Maria. Thanks so much to Olivia for lining up Maria to join us.

Thanks so much to Maria for being a wonderful model for us, and to Debbie and Olivia for listening to me ramble on about photography! It was so much fun and I hope we can have more workshops in the future.

I know I’ve had several requests in the last couple weeks about a beginner’s photography workshop, and we are currently talking about the details of making something like that happen. Stay posted! Shoot me a comment if you’d be interested in attending a beginner workshop.