Natasha, Photoshoot on UT campus
During labor day weekend I decided to expand my portfolio with some new portraits. One of Nadia’s friends (Natasha Mohr) was kind enough and agreed to model for me. On September 3rd we spent few hours on UT campus and ended up with a series of almost 100 pictures which I plan to narrow down to 10-15 for use in my portfolio. During the shoot I was trying to concentrate on few key aspects of portrait photography:
1) Lighting Lighting Lighting. I was trying to make sure Natasha was facing light at all times. When that could not be achieved, I was using on and off camera flash to fill.
2) No bad shadows on model’s face. Closely tied to item #1 - every time I’d see cross lighting, I’d try to fill with flash. Every time I’d notice “eye sockets” - I’d fill with flash
3) Skin tones. I wanted to make sure to give her skin this soft glamour look and feel. I tried to achieve that by nailing white balance in post processing and exposing for the skin tones to begin with.
Equipment used: Nikon D300, SB-800 (on and off camera), Tamron 17-50 f/2.8, Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR. Processed in Nikon Capture NX 1.3
Click on the image below to see the entire gallery.
September 16th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Great pictures! Did you give instructions on posing or she is a real model?
I really love those pictures next to the water, thought that you’ve used flash on those, but no, EXIF is showing that there was no flash! :)) Great! How long was the photosession?
Have you ever try to use reflector for photoshoots?
September 16th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Thanks Galina!
Natasha mostly posed herself and no, she’s not a real model :) It kind of went like this - I’d ask her to strike a pose and see if I like it. If it didn’t look good or if small adjustments needed to be done, I’d ask her to change or correct the little things (like placing hands or something like that). So, mostly it was trial and error. But she did a terrific job coming up with new poses and didn’t mind to rotate though some that we already tried but when wearing different outfits.
I did use flash a lot. The reason smumug is not showing it is because I mostly used it off camera. Especially by the water, the flash was on a light stand 6-8 feet away from Natasha, on my right hand side at 45 degrees angle firing directly straight at her. I was probably 20-30 fit away with a 70-200 zoom, triggering main flash with my on-camera built in flash which was set to commander mode and was not contributing to overall exposure. I’m guessing that’s why smugmug is not showing those images as “flash”.
Photosession lasted probably 2 may be 2.5 hours. We started when the sun was still quite high (so we were mostly looking for all sorts of creative shadows) and we finished when the sun was almost gone.
I never tried using reflector. I think it’s a great idea but would require an assistant which I don’t have :-) Flash makes it a bit easier - I toss it up on to a light stand and I can control its power output from my camera, never needing to touch it. With the reflector I’d be running back and forth, constantly adjusting it and repointing it. But if I had an assistant I’d definitely experiment with it.